We Blog CRM

It isn’t just individuals that make New Year’s resolutions—companies make them as well. Forrester Research recently released a report about CRM applications, as a guide to companies looking to tighten up application development without breaking the bank this year. This week, Lauren McKay at CRM Magazine took to the publication’s website and outlined five routes CRM software vendors should take in order to pursue “lean and mean” application development.

1.    Move to the Cloud
This first morsel of advice from Forrester isn’t surprising in the least. Companies creating business applications have heard for years now that they should move toward cloud development, and many have. Forrester specifically recommends public cloud environments like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, and reminds us that cloud benefits include scalability and cost-efficiency, and that it offers a number of entry points. In addition, cloud computing is undoubtedly the future of application development, so it would be unwise to at least begin experimenting in cloud environments.

2.    Operate like a startup
The economy seems to be on the up and up so far, but it’s early in the year still and so Forrester is advising companies to adopt the no-nonsense attitude of a fledgling business. Startups don’t have the resources larger companies enjoy, and so there is little room for error. Therefore established companies looking to tighten up should put a little more pressure on themselves and be more goal-oriented.

3.    Put cost and flexibility above platform loyalty
In terms of language frameworks, Forrester found that even though Java EE and .NET remain the most popular for CRM application development, there are a number of popular alternatives, like Adobe Flex, Drupal, and Google Web Toolkit, to name a few. There are a number of open source, rich Internet applications and dynamic language frameworks that are emerging, so companies should reevaluate what their needs are and then choose a path, rather than sticking with the more popular and convenient choice.

4.    Make the customer experience your *top* priority
The customer experience has always been, in theory, every business’s number one priority. However, Forrester concluded that things get a bit muddled in practice, mainly because even the most talented developers can be unversed in designing applications that will truly impress customers. Naturally, companies that succeed in pleasing their customers are more likely to see repeat purchases and recommendations, so really digging deep into market research to wow them is paramount.

5.    Hire multitalented developers
This last step is definitely one of the hardest to fulfill, because truly gifted developers don’t grow on trees. But what Forrester is trying to indicate here is that companies should consider a programmer’s business knowledge when making a decision. Multitalented developers may be difficult to find now, but luckily, there is an increasing number of developers who’ve studied business management and have a solid grasp on enterprise processes.

This week, SugarCRM announced its CRM products would be the latest applications to join the Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, thereby offering customers and resellers the benefit of real-time scalability, accessibility, and on-demand foundation.

SugarCRM’s recently ppointed CEO Larry Augustin is quoted in the press release saying that Windows Azure goes “well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today,” and noted that the new service is key to the Sugar Open Cloud, facilitating the deployment of Sugar products to any location.

The process behind making SugarCRM applications available on the cloud only took a few weeks—this speedy turnaround time is attributed to the strong native support Windows Azure delivers for PHP, which is the programming language in which Sugar is written.

There have recently been warnings from Azure competitors and others that releasing Windows Azure developments could result in that customer being locked into the system. Still, the executives at SugarCRM seem not to be worried about this. One potential hazard that could arise, however, is that channel partners hosting SugarCRM on their own may see competition from the Azure cloud, but only time will tell.

Meritide, a Minnesota-based IT consulting firm, announced last week that they expanded their full-service Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions practice. Meritide provides strategy, integration, design, and implementation services to upper mid-market companies, and with their expanded Microsoft Dynamics CRM products, will provide clients with insight into sales, marketing, and service activities.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is highly flexible and customizable, and is distributed entirely through a partner system (which allows for even greater personalization). It offers tight integration with Microsoft Office applications—which helps reduce training time—and one Meritide customer, Emprimus, was especially taken with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online tool.

Emprimus offers solutions protecting against intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI), and does most of their marketing through trade shows, large presentations, and industry associations. Emprimus’s President and CEO, Gale Nording, said the Dynamics CRM Online application was extremely helpful for streamlining the sales cycle, but declined to give specific details.

Meritide also implements BMC solutions, but the company’s president, Patrick Irestone, noted that Microsoft Dynamics deployments have increased with customers’ demand for cost-effective solutions. Microsoft recently reduced the base prices of their CRM solutions (and are offering 6 months free to Salesforce.com and Oracle users), and given the satisfaction of Meritide’s customers, business will only get better for Dyanamics.

This month, Consona announced the availability of the first version of Consona Knowledge Driven Support (KDS) at the Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas. The product debuted last October, and draws on technology from the former Onyx CRM and KNOVA KM applications, as well as from the recently-acquired SupportSoft eService suite.

Since its release last year, Knowledge Driven Support has received Verified v4 status with the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS); every year the non-profit alliance highlights, or “verifies,” those products that it thinks best reflect their best-practice guidelines. Consona KDS is the only product that has achieved such verification for both knowledge and incident management, and aims to help external service and support organizations achieve best-practice objectives through unifying and measuring every agent on every channel.

Knowledge Driven Support will provide multi-channel support integrated with a single knowledgebase with consistent knowledge, automatic delivery of relevant knowledge based on specifics within the case in question, and analytics tracking use of knowledge in certain situations to ultimately pinpoint the causes of customer demand. In addition the official release of KDS will precede new price points and deployment options—namely a cloud-based SaaS option, adding an economical quality to its functionality.

Monday, Salesforce.com announced a new deal that will both improve Force.com’s CRM services and help the cloud application to branch out from its CRM mold: they signed a deal with Adobe to link Adobe Flash to Force.com. Analyst James Governor calls the alliance a means of pushing Force.com into its “2.0” phase by providing “rich internet application development experience.”

The Adobe Flash Builder will be the new provision for unified development, and will facilitate deployment of Flash applications on Force.com. Because this is an innovation to the Force.com platform, the overarching intention is that the builder be used to extend Salesforce.com CRM applications, but it can also be helpful for creating web sites, and desktop apps that can run outside the browser.

During its three-year tenure, Force.com has garnered some 63,000 customers, who’ve built 120,000 applications. With its Salesforce branding, Force.com attracts plenty of users looking mainly for CRM solutions, but also a fair number looking for non-enterprise solutions. A research analyst at Gartner noted that more and more companies look to Force.com to develop non-CRM applications. This partnership with Adobe Flash certainly gives an added accessibility to building CRM applications, and will thus be an undoubted success.

Last week, iLinc for Salesforce was named the “App of the Week” on the Force.com AppExchange. Every week, SaaS applications that integrate with Salesforce.com’s CRM platform are presented, and iLinc’s offering was featured for its ability to integrate webinar data with existing Salesforce CRM data, which in turn allows users visibility to effectively sell and communicate with potential customers, and reinforce loyalty with existing customers. Another factor in selection was that the iLinc app provides virtual meetings directly from Salesforce Lead and Contact records.

iLinc’s President and CEO, James Powers, stated that his company’s development strategy centers on working out tangible business problems, so an integration with Salesforce—establishing a real-time connection with CRM—was an obvious solution. The motive behind this particular integration is to get businesses to move webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, and easily and effectively follow up with attendees using Salesforce CRM.

Reviews of iLinc for Salesforce have been positive so far, and as iLinc is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user conference), attendees will learn more about the product during the November convention.

Another coup for the cloud: SplendidCRM announced this week that their latest version of Community Edition will run on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

SplendidCRM develops Microsoft-centric CRM solutions for open-source users, so the Azure connection is not entirely surprising. Splendid can be installed to run the database in SQL Azure with the web application running locally, and can also be set to run the database in SQL Azure and the web app in Windows Azure. The goal, of course, is for costumers to cut costs while enjoying increased functionality and quick deployment.

The Microsoft Silverlight 3 Toolkit has also advanced SplendidCRM’s product, as continued incorporation of the environment has recently replaced the previous flash-based and hand-made charts. And the latest incarnation of Splendid’s query engine has been optimized to handle millions of records by employing a custom paging program. Another new search improvement is the added ability to search for duplicate records and merge duplicates into a single record.

SplendidCRM has been tested on all current variations of Windows, and while reviews have not been issued yet, it will be interesting to hear what Windows users think of these new improvements.

The rapidly increasing popularity of social networking platforms is news to no one. Twitter was steadily drawing users at the beginning of 2009 and then exploded since Oprah joined in April, and names like Facebook and LinkedIn are more and more familiar in the household. This proliferation of social networking is not just for the masses though—as a tool to developing brands it already indispensible to many businesses, and this spring many CRM systems began integrating social networking features into their platforms. This incorporation was inevitable, and with it has come a new kind of CRM customer.

Systems by Salesforce.com and the like initially implemented social CRM (sCRM) features to allow businesses to build a meaningful rapport with their customers and provide timely customer support. Recently it has become a means for following the conversations surrounding particular brands and topics, and is fast becoming invaluable to the industries who deal in brand creation and development rather than sales: the PR and marketing communities. The gamer-spawned Lithium Technologies was at the forefront of sCRM with a platform for brands that was customer-driven, and many CRM providers began adopting social networking elements to provide better and more efficient customer support. Startups like Scout Labs and Buzzstream have evolved this system into a slightly different animal, creating packages that track and organize media and social media coverage, and helping those who need to build and maintain relationships with the individuals who are starting and influencing the conversations. CRM systems are very much associated with sales- and enterprise-driven customers, but this developing ability to monitor web content—and monitor it in real time—is broadening the CRM systems’ customer base,  giving PR, advertising and marketing reps a new way to focus on building relationships.

This week, Zoho launched Zoho Discussions, their new platform for creating public and private support forums for employees and customers to comments on a particular topic. Features include branding widgets, integrated chat, user profiles, SEO options, and “sticky” posts (which is a highlight a community moderator can award to a post that is especially good or important) just to name a few.

Zoho Discussion forums are completely customizable to represent a company’s brand, and the sheer number of options for customer service administration makes Discussions more than just another forum platform. Because Zoho has a history of making integrative products, speculations about integration possibilities are rising. ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett thinks Discussions will be a boon for ERP software, arguing that such a sophisticated forum application could provide the real-time information necessary to the alert systems driving transformational value between collaborative teams. Others see this new release as simply another step in stride—though a very accessible step, at that—with Zoho’s tradition of creating new products and add-ons to their existing goods. Whether Zoho Discussions’ ambitions turn out big or small, for now the platform will be a definite draw for the SMEs the startup tends to attract.

With the technical preview of Office 2010 several months ago, Microsoft announced a web-based companion to the suite, Office Web Applications, which some predict will be the “Google Apps Killer.” Last week, Microsoft released a partial preview of the online package to beta testers and invited guests. Web Apps features extensions of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word (and eventually OneNote), will be hosted in Windows Live SkyDrive and Microsoft SharePoint, and has received positive feedback thus far.

SkyDrive is a free, online storage space of 25GB available to any users of Windows Live (of which there are about 500 million), and will store Web Apps content created by Live users. SkyDrive is not intended for enterprise users, so businesses interested in Web Apps need SharePoint—storage that will soon be integrated with the MS Cloud, Azure—or Office volume licensing.

Like Google Apps, Web Apps doesn’t require any desktop applications—users without the desktop Office suite can still view content. However, as it stands, Web Apps seems best thought of as a supplement to the desktop platform. One of the biggest issues is that Web Apps’ Word only allows for document viewing, not editing. In addition, Web Apps doesn’t allow for web site building, and it only facilitates simple composition within PowerPoint and Excel. The official version of Web Apps will permit editing within Word, but some of the other editing inabilities will remain and only be available through the desktop version.

Since the preview’s release, reviews have been favorable. Given Microsoft’s aim to create seamless interaction between OS, browser, and mobile, it is notable that a preview of the SharePoint mobile integration was well received. Also, many testers were pleased to see Web Apps function capably outside of Internet Explorer. For users looking for light web-based CRM, perhaps the biggest boon is Web Apps’ similarity to its desktop counterpart. The bells and whistles aren’t all there, but there’s no learning curve for those already accustomed to Office Suite apps. We’ll have to wait for kinks in the test version to be fixed before judging whether Web Apps is indeed the Google Apps “killer,” but for now, it is a formidable opponent.