We Blog CRM

South African company i5 has been named the first global winner of the Microsoft Partner of the Year award in the category, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The award is to be presented at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas, in July.

According to i5 CEO Glen Ansell , the award is the culmination of the company’s determination and sharp focus on the Microsoft technology stack, and specifically, Dynamics CRM. “Having recognised the viability and relevance of Microsoft’s CRM package soon after the inception of i5 in 2004, our company took a strategic decision to become the South African market leader in this aspect of Microsoft’s technology solutions,” he says.

The audience for video games is zealous but fickle, and because of that, game studios have a unique challenge in attracting and retaining customers. While the tools they use are similar to those of other industries, studios have learned to be creative in the marketing tactics that support the effort.

The video game industry considers CRM to be a vital aspect of their business as it is based on a recurring payment model where the length of the subscription and the loytalty of the customer are linked. Renewing customer interest is important to have them coming back for more.  Micro-payments and sometimes item-by-item payment are the lifeblood of this business and these have to be renewed through offering something new frequently and letting the customer know about it.

Maximizer Software announced its partnership with McObject to enhance mobile productivity on Maximizer’s mobile CRM offering for BlackBerry smartphone devices.

With the new partnership, on-the-road sales professionals, business owners and others relying on popular BlackBerry devices will be able to store more critical data from Maximizer CRM onto their mobile device. The Perst Lite object-oriented embedded database from McObject, running on the Java ME mobile device platform, will enable CRM data to be stored on flash memory-based Secure Digital (SD) cards to extend storage capacity while on the road - making it possible to access more customer information in real-time, instead of relying on networks to download new data to the device.

CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDC Corporation and a global provider of industry-specific enterprise software applications and consulting services, recently announced that its Pivotal 6.0 CRM software suite has been named by ISM Inc., a premier CRM consulting firm, as one of the “Top 15″ CRM software packages in the enterprise category for 2008, its 12 consecutive appearance in this prestigious listing.

The Top 15 are divided into two categories-1) Enterprise, and 2) Small & Medium Business (SMB) - to reflect the changes in, and growth of, the CRM marketplace.

Pivotal CRM 6.0 was chosen after intensive testing by the ISM Software Lab at its Bethesda, Md.-based headquarters. Each package was rated according to 217 selection criteria, including 103 business functions, 52 technical features, 36 implementation capabilities, 9 real time criteria and 17 user-support features.

Inetium, a Microsoft partners, has announced that it will be conducting an Accelerated Deployment Program for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers. The program will help businesses to start quickly and effectively with the Dynamics online CRM.

Headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, Inetium provides technology consulting services to organizations of all size throughout the United States. Inetium officials say the their company is committed to increasing people and organizational productivity by providing IT planning services, customer relationship management, business productivity, IT infrastructure, Web strategies and real estate technology products.

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.

The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality is readying a R46 million citizen relationship management (CRM), billing, financial and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for its debut in October.

The system forms part of the metropole’s Project Connect that is based on Microsoft .Net technology and a service orientated architecture that integrates 27 discreet legacy systems into a whole.

The work is being done by Fujitsu Services SA, whose head of application services, Pierre van der Merwe, says the implementation will affect 3 700 Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality staff and should revolutionise their ability to serve the residents of Port Elizabeth, Despatch and Uitenhage.

Dovarri has announced today the signing of a three year contract with its newest client, the Houston Texans. The Texans, Houston’s National Football League (NFL) franchise, will retain Dovarri to provide Sales Force Automation and Customer Relationship Management (SFA/CRM) services through Orizon, Dovarri’s recently released software.

Orizon, Enterprise SFA/CRM software built entirely on the Microsoft Windows SharePoint platform, integrates with the Texans’ proprietary database, which is also built on the SharePoint platform. Orizon manages the sales process and aligns sales procedures within their sales team.

It appears that even the most “social” business functions of marketing and sales are not perfectly happy with the way social CRM is shaping up. These functions would rather have commissions and sales instead of a community.

What I don’t get is that even when they have a good thing going they are getting into cribs and nags about small things. Do they expect the software to close the deals for them. Maybe the whole thing is not as big a deal, maybe it is - for Oracle has come out with Sales Prospector, which is meant to help sales teams or individual sales reps build information-sharing networks that, in theory, will help them close more deals.

Of course, the key here is the sharing of data between salespeople. Would I want to share details on leads with fellow sales guys if my commissions depended on it?