We Blog CRM

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.

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.

Verticals onDemand, a vendor of Software-as-a-Service CRM products for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, has secured $4 million of funding from Emergence Capital Partners, a venture capital firm specializing in investing in technology-enabled services companies.

Emergence has a habit of backing winning horses, its other investments include Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and HireRight. Verticals hopes to ride the next big wave of SaaS that will cover the vertical market and platform-as-a-service. The company will use the funding to further develop its flagship product – the VBioPharma SaaS CRM application for the life sciences market.

Boomi, an on-demand integration vendor, announced that it has partnered with Zuora to enable Software-as-a-Service integration for Zuora’s on-demand billing application with financial and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

Using Boomi On Demand, Zuora’s customers can integrate Z-Billing with QuickBooks, for example, by selecting the prepackaged integration from a menu, and the integration is complete — no data mapping, coding, software downloads or hardware purchases. If the end customer wants to integrate Z-Billing with other applications, the integrations are built, deployed and managed by Boomi On Demand using only a browser.

A May 2008 report released by Forrester offers insight into the best possible ways for getting the best out of your SaaS CRM. SaaS CRM, as we all know by now, has made the leap from being in the fringes to becoming a mainstream player. Forrester choses to reiterate the fact for us and bases its statement on research that yields encouraging figures for SaaS. Adoption for SaaS CRM is growing at double digit rates.

Best practice recommendations include -

1. Having the right business case that considers more than just the cost.
2. Involve IT to negotiate the right contract.
3. Learn about hidden costs.
4. Implement the right deployment procedures.
5. Implement data security best practices.

RightNow Technologies has a added multi-channel feedback features in its May ‘08 release of its on-demand CRM package. Essentially, a consumer feedback feature, the new feature incorporates online chat. This throws open several possibilities for web marketers. They can obtain consumer feedback in real time, customers can get issues resolved faster, surveys are attached with the chat platform, and the contact between and company and its customers becomes more personal.

RightNow CRM enables surveys during phone calls, via e-mail as well as on the Web. The chat feature will help RightNow CRM strengthen its position as an application friendly towards business-to-customer communication.

The economy may be going slow but Salesforce.com, the poster boy for SaaS, has reported an impressive 52% increase in revenue for the first quarter that ended on April 30. It has also increased its customer base by 6%.

Salesforce.com has reported impressive figures that have been achieved on the basis of a strong and growing customer base in the US and in Asia. It added 2.600 more companies to its roster in the quarter and reported revenue of $ 247.6 million leading to a net profit of $ 9.56 million.

In Asia, Salesforce.com can count on Nippon Telephone and Telegraph in Japan as a major catch and in Europe it was Areva, a nuclear power company in France, for which Salesforce.com had to face competition from SAP.

iEnterprises has launched Mobile Edge Express, a SaaS product aimed at mobile users who wish to maximize the productivity of their IBM Lotus Notes applications, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, and SugarCRM to their BlackBerry® smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM). The company pitches the product as being ideal for SMBs that can download the pre-written application without any upfront hardware costs and licensing fees. The download takes less than 10 minutes.

According to Verticals onDemand, as many as 15 life science companies have been added to its SaaS CRM user-base. The ProStrakan Group based in the UK has selected VBioPharma to market its products in the US.

“I already knew the pluses and minuses of most of the major pharma CRM vendors from previous experience,” said Paul Bidawid, Vice President of Managed Markets & Supply Chain at ProStrakan.”SaaS is definitely where we’re heading.”

Matt Wallach, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Verticals onDemand, said SaaS technology is “much more flexible and cost-effective than client/server systems of ten years ago, making it attractive to pharma and biotech companies.”

AdventNet’s Zoho CRM has come out with an Enterprise Edition that is a low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering. It offers sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules. It aims to fulfill the requirements of corporate customers who demand organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

Learn more about it here.