We Blog CRM

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.

Enterprise is getting it’s own Facebook! Salesforce.com kicked off their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and CEO Marc Benioff made the major announcement during his keynote speech: their new private social network, Salesforce Chatter.

Benioff has been advocating the use of real-time data for some time now, so it comes as no surprise that Salesforce would incorporate the social networking trend. Chatter is very much like Facebook, but it’s still an ambitious undertaking. People, applications, and content can have profiles, and there are also status updates that can be used to start conversations. The platform can be used to develop social enterprise applications, and all the 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter as well. No social media application within CRM seems complete without Twitter, and of course Chatter will incorporate the micro-blogging service, filtering the relevant Twitter feeds into the real-time data stream.

Native applications built on the Force.com platform can stream updates to Salesforce Chatter’s feed. Chatter is expected to be available next year, and will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com, and sold separately for $50 per user per month. It will be available for mobile devices as well, and will support iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. It’s a wonderful idea, and definitely takes attention away from Microsoft’s announcement that they would be integrating LinkedIn information to Outlook. Below, there is a bonus photo of the platform’s (slightly scary) mascot, Chatty.

Last week, Oracle announced the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1, which they developed after customer feedback indicated businesses were most interested in solutions that could accelerate business performance with a lower cost of ownership. Because no system update is complete without a social media facelift, CRM 9.1 was redesigned to tout a Web 2.0 user interface and experience, with new collaboration tools like wikis, forums and chats, and blogs and tagging. In addition, CRM 9.1 features drag-and-drop interactivity, search windows, and simpler navigation.

PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 is built on Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 technology platform, which is a development environment that offers flexibility in managing and integrating applications. Oracle cites the “lower cost of ownership” as being manifested in PeopleSoft’s compatibility with previous application releases—and therefore not requiring upgrades in core CRM applications—but this is a tad misleading because it doesn’t necessarily benefit those who aren’t already Oracle customers. For sales and marketing deployments, CRM 9.1 does provide more precise application configurations, which cuts some of the cost of customization.

Specific to sales and marketing customers, CRM 9.1 aims to lower cost marketing channels and expand reach with SMS messaging and an all-inclusive event manager. There will also be mass sales activity reassignment capabilities for sales managers. Still, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 can be tailored for many different verticals, from higher education to the communications market.

Cisco Systems has made a number of acquisitions in the past two months, and now they’ll be working on a new product for next year: an integration connecting their on-demand contact center telephony with Salesforce.com’s contact center software. Set for release in the first quarter of 2010, this new offering will be called the Customer Interaction Cloud, and will target small and medium-sized businesses.

This is not the first time Cisco and Salesforce.com have teamed up—their first integration was the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com. The application was available on Force.com, and integrated Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager with Salesforce. The Customer Interaction Cloud will integrate Cisco’s Unified Communications with Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2—this new product is entirely cloud-based, so in many ways it’s a modern version of the prior integration. As an on-demand product, it will eliminate any concerns over hardware, and allow users to focus on delivering customer service.

Customer Interaction Cloud is aimed at businesses with 30 to 300 support representatives, but it may also appeal to larger enterprises that opening new branches, or are in need of quickly deployable support systems.

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.

Last week, IBM delivered a strong third quarter, and the success can be largely attributed to the company’s gradual shift toward software and services from hardware.

The better-than-expected profit and revenue growth can be summed up thus: $3.1 billion third quarter net income, or $2.40 per share. These numbers are down from a year ago, but Wall Street had projected earnings of $2.38 a share for this year. This ups IBM’s earnings for the year, as they are now expected to close 2009 at $9.85 a share.

Company CFO Mark Loughridge says they gained market share in both software and hardware, but their hardware growth is not doing as well as in previous years, with their mainframe server revenue down 26% from a year ago. Global business services numbers were also down from last year, but still represent a relative success with $4.34 billion in revenue. And though Loughridge was not forthcoming with details, he expressed confidence in corporate demand stabilizing in the next year, and IBM’s future (multiple) opportunities.

Salesforce.com and Dell have been longtime partners, and earlier this week they announced they are teaming up to target SMBs. They will offer joint, certified cloud-computing CRM bundles that will be priced as low as $9 per user per month (the cost of Salesforce’s Contact Manager Edition).

Salesforce and Dell have been testing the solution within their respective companies: Salesforce runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment, and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with their on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Integration Services. For Salesforce, this collaboration with Dell is a means of extending the adoption of cloud computing services, as it gives smaller businesses the obvious cloud-computing benefit of managing customer relations without the cost of managing infrastructure while utilizing pre-existing hardware.

Businesses with multipart IT systems will benefit from Dell Integration Services, which provides inexpensive and fast integration and migration for businesses using Salesforce’s cloud. Dell will more or less be reselling the stable of Salesforce.com products—from the Contact Manager to the Enterprise Edition—and offering the integration services.

CRM software and services provider Chordiant Software has released a new version of its real-time conversation and interaction management application for organizations with high customer-interaction volumes. The new Recommendation Advisor 6.1 has the ability to come up with “Next-Best-Action” recommendations for agents based on the software’s understanding of the conversation between a call-center agent and a customer.

It can also work in the self-service format where it provides personalized offers and recommendations. In fact the software is advanced enough to offer information on the moods of the customer so that the agents can speak accordingly. The software is built upon the Chordiant Decision Management, a suite of predictive and adaptive decisioning applications.

Coveo Solutions, Inc., is offering Coveo G2B for CRM, an application for bringing together data from diverse sources including salesforce.com, Siebel Systems, corporate intranets, tech support emails, customer support databases, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

G2B also offers content analytics and graphical representation of data so that making sense of tons of data and spotting trends becomes easier. Coveo’s product should further add impetus to mashup devices that help in extracting information from an ever increasing array of sources that come from so many different vendors.

The usefulness of such an application can hardly be overstated. It will help decision makers to arrive at decisions faster and after acquiring a holistic view of the scenario.