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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.

Although hosted CRM companies are mushrooming by the day and the march of SaaS seems to keep moving forward onerously, helped now by the promise of Storage-as-a-Service, the jury is still out on whether SaaS CRM is a good fit for all or can hosted CRM harm your business.

Perhaps the question can be answered better if we have clarity on what CRM offers the best business value.  The type of CRM activity, whether operational, collaborative, or analytical, often decides whether the particular CRM modules should be in-house or hosted. The company approach to data security is another contributing factor.

Hosted CRM offers the following benefits -

• Faster time to value.
•  Easy deployment.
• Frequent updates.
• Cost-effective.
• Often the only alternative for SMBs.

On the flip side -

• You need regular high-speed internet connectivity.
• Over time, the TCO can shoot up.
• Shifting to another vendor may not be easy.
• Data security is always a nagging worry because its not in your control.
• Customization and integration is not always easy.

Efforts by companies to get their staff used to mobile CRM are running into an unexpected problem. Company people are not comfortable with the idea of using their mobile devices for complex business applications; they are happy using it to check emails and run not-so-sophisticated programs. Sales people apparently do not want to turn their mobile devices into handheld versions of their PCs.

Add to that the fact that the mobile CRM market is constrained by small screen sizes and limited storage and memory plus weak computation power and you being to get an idea about why mobile CRM still has not been able to take off.

“A lot of business applications that are done in house have to do with analytics,” notes Saswato Das, a spokesman for SAP’s business applications unit. “If you want to run something fairly sophisticated that requires a lot of memory, that requires a lot of computing power, a handheld today is not the best place to do it.”