We Blog CRM

Microsoft Corp. is suing Salesforce.com Inc with the accusation that the customer relationship management (CRM) giant has infringed nine patents for ways to make software more efficient.

The complaint targets the customer-relationship management software that is the hallmark of Salesforce.com’s business. It seeks a court order that would prevent the San Francisco-based company from providing features that Microsoft claims it invented.

Salesforce.com, the biggest seller of internet-based customer relationship management software with $1.3 billion in sales last year, was founded in 1999 and offers software that businesses subscribe to and use over the web for running marketing campaigns and tracking sales leads. It competes against Microsoft’s Dynamics software in the CRM market.

“Microsoft has been a leader and innovator in the software industry for decades and continues to invest billions of dollars each year in bringing great software products and services to market,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel for intellectual property and licensing. Microsoft “cannot stand idly by when others infringe” our intellectual property rights, he said.

The complaint was filed in federal court in Seattle after more than a year of talks, according to Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker. The CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, has said he wants customers and software developers to write online applications on his system, dubbed Force.com, much like the way personal computer programs run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

update CRM Inc, a European CRM solutions innovator, has launched its new update.revolution CRM suite to North America. update.revolution is an advanced cloud-based enterprise-managed CRM service designed specifically for the sales organizations of all sized in the life sciences market. This includes biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

update.revolution was launched in Europe earlier this year as an advanced customer relationship management technology deployed through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and implemented with update software’s unique strategic revolution methodology which provides each customer with ongoing industry expertise at no extra cost.

SaaS-based CRM solution, update.revolution, is hosted on the IBM cloud to provide life sciences companies with a cost-effective, hosted platform for managing the core of their revenue generation: sales. It requires no up-front investment and provides an all-inclusive ongoing development and consulting methodology that provides long-term cost predictability.

The update.revolution methodology begins with an in-depth assessment phase through which the update CRM Principal determines the customer’s goals using a proprietary computer-supported analytics system and specifies which industry processes and modular functions are required. This assessment helps ensure better results in adoption and compliance in the near term and protects the evolution of the platform in the long term as users get comfortable and information requirements grow.

update CRM’s SaaS model is available in three service levels: 90°, 180°, and 360°. Among other things, the service level selected influences the degree of customization and the frequency of the adaptation cycles in the ongoing enhancement. update CRM customers are not charged for costs associated with operation, maintenance, and support.

Typical provisioning results in a functional system up and running within 20 days, with additional functionality, modules and customizations made on an ongoing basis.

The CRM industry is evolving very quickly. Once upon a time, there were only a handful of choices for CRM software but now one can find almost endless choices. New features are included almost on a daily basis and new products and versions are released regularly. Web-based CRM enjoys high demand among small to medium-sized businesses.

Web-based CRM systems are gaining popularity over installable ones and the new trends reveal that many medium and big firms are also moving towards web-based solutions. Many installable CRM providers are now offering web-based versions of their software.

What are some reasons for the success of web based CRM?

There are no installation costs. Installing an on-premise solution consumes a significant portion of a company’s budget. Expense is involved in creating networks, creating databases, programming software and configuring them, maintaining databases and creating backup procedures, staffing IT posts and hiring people and so on. But web-based systems do not need any of these. Users need only pay a small fee at the end of the month.

They offer always up-to-date systems. Unlike on-premise systems, software updates are not needed, nor the purchase of a newer version of the solution to get the latest features. Most CRM providers are keen to include new features free of cost.

They are backed with the latest data security protection. Web-based CRMs come with powerful database hosting services that use the most updated anti-virus and anti-hacking tools which usually cost thousands of dollars if you want them locally. The databases are constantly backed up.

They are easily accessible anytime, anywhere. As the data and software are hosted remotely, one can get the same functionality anytime, anywhere. Most on-demand CRMs also have mobile and wireless versions.

Web-based CRM systems are simpler and easier to operate than a traditional system. Even if there’s the feeling that the software is not working for you or is hard to customize, you can switch to a new provider painlessly and almost without any loss of money.

Last but not least, CRM providers offer free trials as an excellent option to review their systems and get familiar with them. With all these helpful options for deciding on the right web-based CRM for your company, evaluating all possible aspects of the solution is a cinch.

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.