We Blog CRM

At the end of last month, Amdocs announced a new version of their Customer Experience Systems (CES) product, as well as some impressive fiscal 1st quarter earnings.

The overall good reviews of Amdoc’s CES 8 make their quarterly earnings less of a surprise, as one of Analysys Mason’s senior analyst noted it was a marked effort by Amdocs to offer complete packages to service providers. Amdocs has productized CES’s capabilities, and therefore very easily offers a package that may have once required custom implementations. CES 8 touts customer satisfaction, communication scalability, and lean technology operations, and is the result of a recent user survey titled “Amdocs’ Connected World Survey 2010.”

Along with consultancy Frost & Sullivan, Amdocs conducted a customer survey, and noticed that the trend toward device connectivity meant service providers had to offer more flexible, better-integrated solutions. The report identified four mean drivers for device connectivity—consumer desire for it, improvements in edge devices, improved network capabilities, and new business models and partnerships—as well several hindrances. Among the obstructions in the way of device connectivity: device- and component-certification processes, buildouts for 3G and 4G networks that are still in progress, and the need for additional network openness and industry standards.

To add to CES 8’s litheness, Amdocs took several approaches. They integrated the capabilities of a Java-based convergent service platform, which will synchronize network services across legacy and IP-based network elements, and create a standard development environment for communication applications. CCES 8 also enables service providers to offer one e-commerce experience for all goods and services with Universal Storefront, which hides the complexity of service providers’ different offerings and configurations. And Amdocs ChangingWorlds’s mobile internet portal allows personalization for quick and easy access to relevant content based on users’ specific interest. Lastly, Amdocs is helping users run leaner with small machine architecture.

Amdocs’ commitment to revolutionizing their product is undoubtedly a large factor in the 19% rise in fiscal quarter earnings. Their revenue fell 4% to $724.8 million, but analysts are forecasting a profit of 54 centers per share on sales of $725.4 million. Amdocs is a CRM heavyweight for sure, but this fact is sometimes muddled, as they make the news less often than some of their competitors. Still, we’re excited to see how the competition responds to their movement toward becoming a one-stop shop.

At last year’s Dreamforce, we saw just how aggressive SugarCRM could be when they staged a guerilla marketing attack. Well, it seems the open-source CRM provider is aggressive in all aspects of business, as they reported a record year in 2009.

While the majority of companies struggled to bring in money—and stay afloat even—SugarCRM had a record year in revenue, customer base, community, and partner development. They added a reported 2,000 commercial customers last year, and 50 new value-added resellers; these new VARs extend SugarCRM’s reach to over 75 countries as well.

Larry Augustin, who took the Sugar helm toward the end of last year, expressed excitement about the company’s current standing, nothing it leaves them prepared for a great 2010. Last year, Sugar partnered with Microsoft to provide Sugar applications on Windows Azure, and they also released their Community Edition on Amazon EC2. Putting the Community Edition on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud allows developers to access, test, and develop Sugar code, making it all the more accessible.

Like any good CEO, Augustin also conveyed excitement about new products coming out in 2010, and Sugar already seems poised to wow customers with new editions. Jigsaw reported recently that the SugarCRM platform is one of the three most-used CRM products globally. In addition, with many predicting that private clouds will be discredited—but not eliminated—in 2010, Sugar will likely be a top choice for public deployments.

NetSuite for iPhone

In terms of mobile CRM, it looks like 2010 is going to be the year the iPhone and Android duke it out. Research in Motion reported better than expected Q3 earnings, but both the iPhone and Android are honing in on the BlackBerry’s livelihood: the enterprise market. (Needless to say, blackouts like the one BlackBerry had this week are also unpleasant.)

Practically since the iPhone’s inception, all the major players have developed iPhone CRM applications: Salesforce.com, Oracle, NetSuite, and the list goes on. Smaller companies are also jumping on the iPhone CRM bandwagon, and it’s no doubt that mobile components are especially important for any CRM vendor that wants to remain competitive. Each of these iPhone CRM apps vary in functional range—from NetSuite’s view-only data, to Bella Solutions’ fully functional application, announced today. As a vendor of web-based field-service management platforms, Bella Solutions is a company that acknowledges the importance of keeping commercial travelers informed, and their iPhone CRM application allows mobile users real-time access to back-office data.

But even if buyers are clamoring for iPhone CRM now, will they be within a year? It’s hard to take the iPhone’s “it” status away, but the Android is certainly trying. And not only is the phone being positioned as hip, but it is also going after enterprise customers in an attempt to poach from BlackBerry. Major CRM vendors already have Android CRM applications, and it’s likely smaller vendors will join in, as they have with the iPhone. Also, while this may not pertain to CRM applications, many developers are decrying Apple’s app-approval process; development on the Android, however, is only getting easier.

It’ll be exciting to see whether the iPhone takes the CRM torch away from BlackBerry, or whether the Android will pick up speed and dominate the enterprise market.

Today, Zoho announced the production release of Zoho Reports, their online reporting and business intelligence tool. Zoho CRM products are wholly web-based, and Zoho Reports emerges with a new pricing model and features after two years in beta. It was formerly known as Zoho DB, and it facilitates data analysis for database administrators and developers.

The new functionalities found in the Zoho Reports’ commercial release are new dashboards and an iGoogle gadget; pricing plans for the new release begin at $15 per month (250,000 rows and 2 users). With the dashboard view, users can collate similar reports and view them all on a single page. The iGoogle gadget, meanwhile, allows users to embed the gadget version of Zoho Reports on their iGoogle homepage, giving them greater access to important data.

A free edition of Zoho Reports will be offered in addition, and features intrinsic to both versions include the ability to upload from a variety of data sources, including Excel and HTML files, and support for both on-demand and on-premise business suites and databases. Zoho Reports also offers a drag-and-drop interface, and collaborative tools through which users can work together on reports. Zoho is also promising secure data.

As a small business CRM vendor, Zoho competes with Google Apps and the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010, so they’ve implemented a less traditional business model: continually launching new products and offerings to their existing products. It’s certainly paid off—they currently have over 2 million users—and it will be interesting to see how Zoho, as the lesser-known brand, remains competitive during the next year.

BatchBook has always been positioned a small business CRM company, and with some recent additions to their product, they may begin changing what that CRM segment is all about. The co-founders of the three-year-old company are in awe of the capabilities social media provide, and one of their recent platform updates is a social contact manager with increased sales functionality. Another upgrade was an integration with web-based help desk software provider Zendesk, which is not the type of integration you’d most expect from a small business CRM offering.

The social network integration adds depth to the contact management space, and BatchBook’s product allows users to track their contacts’ conversations and generally get a better idea of what they are talking about. The dashboard is customizable and supports a number of social networks, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Flickr, and users can generate lists by searching, and by tagging functionality with the Social Media SuperTag.

There were also a number of new features added to BatchBook for Sales, like customized fields for deals management, a complex calendar, and a module for assigning leads to sales associates. BatchBook is also a part of The Small Business Web, which is a community of companies with open APIs, allowing them to integrate their offerings more easily.

The Zendesk integration provides users with a dashboard widget that displays open Zendesk tickets assigned to them, and it also provides an activity log widget on each contact record that displays any Zendesk tickets submitted by a contact. It offers a nice range of capabilities for BatchBook users, but it’ll be interesting to see exactly how many such features the company continues to add, as it could crowd the space traditionally offered in small business CRM packages.

SugarCRM announced today that their partnership with KnowledgeTree and iNetProcess will take them to the commercial enterprise content management (ECM) space. SugarCRM is known as a leader in open-source CRM offerings, and KnowledgeTree is an ECM provider that focuses on affordable document management software (DMS); iNetProcess is a European provider of services around open source CRM and DMS applications, and provides the architecture behind the new application, iNetDocs.

iNetDocs offers seamless integration between data stored in KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM, so users leveraging the app can search, browse, and retrieve information from documents and folders in the KnowledgeTree repository, and view them on the SugarCRM platform. A tab within the Sugar interface connects directly to the KnowledgeTree information, and said info can be added to lead and contact information when necessary.

The free community edition of iNetDocs has been available for about year to SugarCRM users, and the commercial edition will offer some new features and customer support. It will be available in the SaaS and on-premise versions of both KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM , and starts at $1490 for 20 users.

Content management and CRM systems are a natural fit, and this new venture will doubtless save users plenty of time switching between applications. The ECM space is growing pretty steadily, so it’ll be interesting to see exactly what the new features are offering in the commercial version iNetDocs that set it apart.

Intuit Software announced last month that they’ll be expanding their reach in the small business CRM space, this time with Intuit Customer Manager. Intuit is best known for its accounting and finance software, like Quicken and Quickbooks, but this latest addition puts the company in direct competition with CRM chiefs like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Naturally, many small business users aren’t working on streamlined management platforms, and rather are running their businesses across a series of products. Intuit’s accounting and finance offerings are already popular with many small businesses, so it isn’t surprising that Customer Manager is their next step in this space. Customer Manager gives users a simple way to see and update their customer data, and eschews the sophistication of large-scale CRM platforms. It provides a platform for contact information, pending tasks, appointments, and more. There’s a BlackBerry version, and Intuit execs say they will soon support other smartphones. Another smart move: businesses already using Quickbooks and Quicken can synchronize the data with Customer Manager, and also information from Microsoft Outlook.

Customer Manager is priced at $9.95 per month for up to five users, which is comparable to the pricing of similar products offered by other companies. Both Salesforce and SugarCRM released contact managers for small business users this year, and though both offer impressive CRM platforms, it’ll be interesting to see how Customer Manager fares considering there are already some 4 million QuickBooks users who can easily adopt the new platform.

SugarCRM released a broad upgrade today, and some of the features resemble those found in Salesforce.com’s newest offerings. SugarCRM 5.5 features a number of real-time functionalities, but their main achievements are a service called “Cloud Connects,” and Social Feeds.

Cloud Connects is a third-party web integration with LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and Hoovers, which touts social feeds with status updates, alerts, and notifications. Sugar’s Social Feeds is the dashboard that actually displays status updates and alerts; this information can be shared between users. Leveraging Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, users will also receive up-to-date account and lead information. People weighing in note that the combination of these services resembles Facebook, and therefore are compelled to draw similarities between the two and Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce’s real-time social network for enterprise. Salesforce.com announced the release of Chatter at their annual Dreamforce conference two weeks ago, and though CEO Marc Benioff insists that Chatter is a platform for collaboration, conference attendees christened it “Facebook for enterprise.”

Naturally, that Cloud Connect’s release is two weeks after Chatter’s precludes its being Sugar’s own version of Chatter. Still, considering SugarCRM staged a relatively successful guerrilla marketing campaign outside Dreamforce, it’s easy to see how many people drew that conclusion. You can see from screen shots of Cloud Connects, the program is more fragmented than Salesforce Chatter. Cloud Connects appears to be more of modular extension of Sugar’s existing CRM platform, while Salesforce Chatter looks, well, like Facebook.

Social Feeds

Cloud Connects' LinkedIn integration

There are a few other features in this upgrade, including a more streamlined Mobile Studio (Sugar’s mobile application) that allows for more editing and creating capabilities. There’s also Dynamic Teams, which improves collaboration on the CRM platform; and My Portal Dashlet, which allows users to view information from external sites and applications from the SugarCRM platform.

It will be interesting to see what other features Sugar adds to Cloud Connects in the future. They’ve been attacking Salesforce.com pretty aggressively, and I’d like to see if they make their social networking features more streamlined (like a “Facebook for enterprise”), or if they maintain the program as it is.

For companies offering CRM lite solutions, or CRM for small businesses, Google Apps has acted as a formidable opponent. But some companies, like on-demand CRM provider Zoho, have smartly  relied on the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” motto, and today they announced the launch of a full integration between Google Docs and their Apps.

Zoho has previously launched a sign-in integration with Google Apps, but with this new integration, users can attach files from Google Docs to Zoho CRM within Leads, Accounts, and Cases. Users who want to attach a document from Google Docs will be prompted to authenticate using their Google credentials (via oAuth), and when that is done, the document will be listed in Zoho CRM. Users will also be able to attach Google Docs files while composing messages in Zoho Mail, by uploading the documents directly from Google Docs or Zoho Docs.

Zoho Projects is another application now integrated with Google Apps. First, the productivity startup launched Zoho Projects for Google Apps, and now users have the option to attach documents from Google to the “Documents” module in Zoho Projects.

This latest integration is another step in Zoho’s strategy of improving their existing product with add-ons and integrating with bigger names. They also support Microsoft SharePoint, and Yahoo IDs. It will be interesting to see how this strategy fares with the upcoming release of Microsoft 2010.

Below, a presentation outlining the Google Docs integration:

Dreamforce was getting an impressive amount of attention even before the announcement of Salesforce Chatter, and a couple software companies launched campaigns to steal some of this interest. Microsoft set up a “truth squad,” for the San Francisco event, and SugarCRM took it a step further, distributing 1,000 pamphlets titled “Behind the Smoke Screen” at the Moscone Center.

The “book” is a sort of parody of Marc Benioff’s memoir, Behind the Cloud, published earlier this year, and accuses Salesforce.com of selling the same technology for the past decade. It even includes some (fake) blurbs from the likes of Kim John Il and PT Barnum. The pamphlet itself is very short and can be seen here, but in a guest entry on the destinationCRM blog, Denis Pombriant shared with readers an email he received from a Sugar PR rep regarding “Behind the Smoke Screen.” The email included excerpts from Benioff’s book that SugarCRM felt were “zingers” made at their expense, in which Benioff calls Sugar’s mock protest at Dreamforce 2006 poorly executed, and Sugar’s attempt to get PR from Salesforce.

The person sending the email makes a swipe at Benioff, calling him “the industry’s most down-to-earth CEO,” and says that to celebrate the release of their “book,” SugarCRM is offering free data migration for Salesforce.com users through the end of the year. In addition, registrants will be entered to win a Moto Droid. By the time Mr. Pombriant made his blog post, he said a PR rep of Sugar’s had confirmed that a Salesforce CRM customer had made the switch.

In Mr. Pombriant’s comments on the email, he says that if companies want to stop Salesforce they need to make better products, and also states that perhaps it’s his “New England roots showing,” but he doesn’t think this sort of email helps Sugar rise above Salesforce. I can say as someone not from New England that it isn’t Mr. Pombriant’s roots giving him that feeling—this is a petty jab at Salesforce, and these kinds of cheap tactics suggest desperation more than anything else, and give credence to Benioff’s suggestion that Sugar seeks PR opportunities from Salesforce.  Most companies are guilty of these guerilla campaigns, but in the end, you have to remember that the product is what’s most important.

Update: a lot of people are considering this campaign a success, and there are copies of the pamphlet being auctioned on Ebay.