The dilemma of customer feedback/product management in the world of software development has always been a peculiar, and at times, vain relationship between vendors and their customers. As this ecommercetimes.com article highlights, traditional, on-premise environments left vendors far removed from customers and feedback on additional functionality. While the SaaS model does present advantages in that … Continue reading »
Posted in March 2009 …
What’s Wrong With “Skinny” CRM Solutions?
Not to beat a dead horse, but after looking over this Infoworld.com article again, I garnered some additional thoughts that I felt deserved being mentioned here. Myth 3 talks about SaaS offering skinnier versions of more sophisticated applications. In many ways, that’s by and far true, particularly with older SaaS applications. But I don’t necessarily … Continue reading »
Dispelling The Myths Of SaaS…Just in Time for Cloud Computing’s
One of the biggest kicks I’ve always gotten out of spending 5+ years in this industry are the perceptions and stereotypes that emerge about particular deployment models, applications, etc. Vendors spend so much time fighting it; customers so much time digging for the truth. That’s why articles such as these always catch my attention. It … Continue reading »
How the Recession Could Flatline Vertical App Sales
A conversation with yet another customer today (these talks are providing some great blog fodder) exposed how this financial services company is looking to cut some of its industry-specific applications in favor of more generic, open software packages. Drilldown specific-apps aside, I could see how vendor consolidation could prove a real issue moving forward for … Continue reading »
Twitter for CRM, or CRM for Twitter?
I just saw that Salesforce.com has announced a new Twitter integration. Welcome to the Twitterverse, better late than never. (SugarCRM has offered free plugins to integrate Twitter into Sugar for nearly a year, and released its own Twitter-like capabilities in the 5.2 release.) But anyway, the new trend of integrating Twitter with your CRM made … Continue reading »
A Great Argument for Updating Your CRM
I have been a big fan of Jim Dickie and his writing since my days at CRM Magazine. Jim has long been a visionary when it comes to the balance between the people side of CRM and the technology side. Jim’s latest thoughts again bridge this divide in a novel manner. Mr. Dickie paints a … Continue reading »
Some Thoughts on Sugar’s Cloud Connectors and Search Capabilities…
I spoke with a customer today that I’ll be recording an audio podcast with in the immediate future, and among other topics, we spoke about their recent upgrade to Sugar 5.2 and their use of the Cloud Connectors for lead qualification. In addition, the director of IT also highlighted the search capabilities in SugarCRM that … Continue reading »
Sometimes the More Things Change…
The folks over at Microsoft CRM have been making some announcements this week. And most of the stuff, in my opinion, is a step in the right direction. The free add-ons are a handful of strong features that I can see a lot of people using. The notion of creating a value-based ecosystem is not … Continue reading »
Microsoft’s and Sun’s Take on the Cloud
I’ve been reading up on Sun Microsystem’s latest offering in the cloud computing space, and taken in the context of Martin’s recent post on Microsoft’s take on the cloud, found some points that nicely compliment each other. Cloud computing still has a long way to go before it reaches the enterprise mainstream, but it’s obvious … Continue reading »
The Least Technical Should be Cloud-Based CRM’s Biggest Target
This morning I took part in a very sales oriented webinar, hosted by 1:1 Media. It was an interesting talk about “rethinking” sales and CRM in the era of cloud computing, social media, etc. But what struck me the most, was that the nature of the questions that popped up. These questions ranged from “what … Continue reading »
