All the talk I’ve heard in the past couple of years around the social revolution and its pertaining to CRM is that all businesses need to become more customer-centric. This means a new level of transparency both inside your organization, and between the company and its customers. I don’t think anyone would disagree with these … Continue reading »
Filed under SaaS …
The Open Cloud – Come for High Availability, Stay for Ownership and Control
While I was traveling through Europe for our CRM Acceleration events over the past several months, some interesting things were happening on the SaaS/Cloud front back here in the U.S. Both Intuit and Sage Software saw serious outages and down times for their SaaS versions of their CRM and ERP product lines. That is some … Continue reading »
Salesforce.com – Going Global with SaaS at the Expense of the Customer?
As a former analyst, one of the highlights of traveling and interacting with our partners is that I get to listen to a lot of stories about the realities of the varied markets in which we operate. Talking about our recent events in Lisbon and Madrid, SugarCRM co-founder Clint Oram made an interesting discovery about … Continue reading »
An Ecosystem of Competition (Salesforce.com) Vs. An Ecosystem of Distribution (SugarCRM)
I spent a lot of the day on calls, between me and CEO Larry Augustin and several with financial analysts. It seems there is a lot of interest in there in SugarCRM’s model where our partners do much of the hosting and SaaS delivery – enabling the kind of flexibility, choice and portability promised by … Continue reading »
Sage to World: “Forget SaaS, Let’s Just do Cloud.”
I wanted to get a “Jump the Shark” type reference in the title of this post – but it didn’t make sense, and frankly is a pretty played out term. Anyway…Sage Software has just announced that they are going to make their applications available in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hmmmm… To me, … Continue reading »
VMForce: Salesforce.com Hits With Java – But Misses on Portability
I am sure I speak for a lot of us here at SugarCRM and in the apps business in general when I say that I was waiting with considerable anticipation when rumors of a Salesforce.com and VMWare partnership began surfacing last month. The potential here, to be honest, was huge. Was Salesforce.com FINALLY going to … Continue reading »
Salesforce.com and Jigsaw: One Half of a Good Idea
I think I would have preferred to call this one 1/100000000000th of a good idea…but it was less catchy. Today Salesforce.com announced it will acquire business contacts data service Jigsaw for $142m. The move leaves Salesforce.com with the ability to pre-load CRM accounts with data – OR – which is more likely, charge a premium … Continue reading »
Open Source, Open Clouds, And Bringing Telephony and Unified Communications to the Masses: Fonality (SugarCon Speaker Spotlight)
When it comes to open source at the top of the stack, SugarCRM has proven that disruptive business models can work very well. But, I would argue that there is an area where open source can have as much if not even more of a disruptive effect – in the call center. While proprietary CRM … Continue reading »
SugarCon Speaker Spotlight: Talend
In a perfect world, we would begin our CRM implementation the first day we start our business. And we’d have just one system of data to deal with when it came to marketing, selling and providing support to our customers. We all know that is a pipe dream. The reality is that we all have … Continue reading »
SugarCon Speaker Spotlight: KnowledgeTree CEO Daniel Chalef
CRM systems are really, really great at centralizing very structured data sets around your prospects, customers, partners, employees etc. However, that is just one part of the data equation when it comes down to the reality of doing business in a connected world. That is where content management systems can help transform a CRM tool … Continue reading »
