A few months ago I was made wise about how Salesforce.com jacks up its price for European customers. The fact that customers may pay up to 50% more shocked me, especially considering how SugarCRM does NOT have an increased price for EU organizations (in fact you could argue it costs less for some EU buyers). … Continue reading »
Filed under salesforce.com …
Treating Customers Like End Users, And Vice Versa…
I have to say, I was a bit surprised to get back to the grind after the holiday weekend, and not see my last blog post ripped to shreds in the comments section by pundits of Salesforce.com. There were a few – but I guess the quiet of a holiday weekend means that this got … Continue reading »
Five Reasons Why Salesforce.com’s Chatter Will Fail
I have been watching the concept of Chatter for a while now. On the one hand, I could kick myself for not making more hype out of Sugar Feeds, the exact same functionality Sugar has had in its product for more than a year prior to availability of Chatter. My bad. On the other hand, … Continue reading »
The Best Lock-In Strategy? Empower Your Customers!
SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin and Eucalyptus CEO former head of MySQL Marten Mickos sat down with Spikesource CEO Kim Polese at the Structure conference today. The talk was around SaaS/Cloud and open source. It was an interesting talk – and brought up some interesting points. I think the most interesting one was not necessarily around … Continue reading »
Salesforce.com’s Chatter and the Conundrum of B2B “Social” CRM
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 »
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 »
Friday Social CRM Thought – Access Controls, Firewalls and True Customer Enablement
This is one of those thoughts that I think we all feel – but rarely gets talked about from a vendor perspective. From a social CRM perspective, one of the biggest hurdles is not the “monitoring” or even the act of engaging with customers – we should be doing that regardless. Instead, where I see … 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 »
