Last week was the annual SugarCRM Customer & Developer Conference called SugarCon. InsideView made a big announcement related to all SugarCRM users being preloaded with sales intelligence. The partnership comes at a time when sales people are overwhelmed with an explosion of data that leaves them spending more time searching for information and less time … Continue reading »
Tagged with SaaS …
SugarCRM’s “Behind the Smokescreen” Campaign – a Huge Success
Wow. That is all I can say. When we first thought up the idea of spoofing Marc Benioff’s latest tome – we really did not think that the prank would generate this much press. Nor did we think it would be one of the most talked about spectacles at Dreamforce. Even Newsweek covered the guerrilla … Continue reading »
Why the “No Software” SaaS Mantra Doesn’t Mean an End to Software Issues
A conversation with a partner that’s reselling our products both in the on-demand and on-premise models unearthed some interesting comments surrounding some of the technical difficulties with deploying SaaS. For years I’ve heard of SaaS’ innate ability to deploy CRM applications with almost no involvement from IT. But when you boil it down, being able … Continue reading »
The ROI Behind CRM Upgrades
I’ve been reading a lot lately about upgrades and product enhancements from the likes of Oracle, Salesforce.com and others. During a down economy, the pressure only increases to realize ROI after making an upgrade, and for enterprises running legacy CRM applications, weighing that decision can be a tough one. It’s a no-brainer, but CRM initiatives … Continue reading »
Increasing User Adoption in a Cloud Computing Model
People have been stressing user adoption and role-based access for CRM for decades, but with cloud computing, I think the traditional human-driven procurement process is being turned on its head. While the change to this more self-service – driven model can bring increased agility and efficiency to an organization, there’s a fallout on how these … Continue reading »
Adoption vs. Scope Creep: Which is to Blame for More Stalled CRM Rollouts?
We preach a lot about the importance of championing the CRM system to all of our customers. Without a lot of top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top support of a CRM system, and all of the enabling technologies in between – it is easy for a CRM deployment to get off track. But – what about the opposite? … Continue reading »
The Sugar Open Cloud and the Real World
I was reading an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times by John Zittrain and the import of the article, and a lot of the comments really echoed with what we have been saying here at Sugar about the benefits of the open cloud, namely: -A “one size fits all” model of the cloud … Continue reading »
Gartner: CRM Market Continues to Grow
In its annual CRM market share report, Gartner found that despite the current economic state we find ourselves in, CRM market revenue grew 12.5% in 2008, driven primarily by on-demand software and analytics packages. It’s a good sign, adn one that points to businesses reasserting their value in current customers during a time when purchasing … Continue reading »
Microsoft Azure: Building Custom Extensions vs. Altering the Architecture
Making a CRM solution fit your business processes, and not visa versa, has been a cornerstone of CRM implementations for well over 10 years, but the concept of leveraging an application’s base functionality as a platform into other capabilities has really taken off with cloud computing. There’s a strong difference between a SaaS vendor providing … Continue reading »
How Debates and Definitions Continue to Drive the Software Industry
James Urquhart had a great post today on the confusing definitions and debate around cloud computing, and how the every expanding definition of cloud computing is driving a sort of “linguistic acquisition strategy,” which in turn is driving industry roadmaps and product development…which will benefit the customer in the long run. If history is any … Continue reading »
