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What does Google Wave mean for CRM?

Invitations to Google Wave, the search giant’s collaboration platform, went out this week.

No, I didn’t get one.

Yes, I signed up for one.

No, I don’t take it personally.

The Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and all those places where gadget-heads meet up to discuss the latest “revolutionary” product is already abuzz about Wave.

So, how does that affect CRM?

Well, Salesforce.com, never a company to hesitate to latch onto emerging technologies, is already prepared to ride the wave (and yes, I promise I will never use that term again).

It issued a demo of a prototype showing how a company could leverage Google Wave with its customer service team.

So, maybe you run a forward-thinking contact center that has evolved past simple phone and IVR communications and now utilize chat and self service and maybe you’ve even found a way to involve social networks, internal and external. But it looks like you may have one more technology and business process to master.

Don’t get me wrong — Google Wave could very well be a very good thing and may, in fact, “revolutionize” how customer service agents interact with your customers. Our friends over at Unified Communications Nation, after all, are calling it Unified Communications gone wild and most people still haven’t wrapped their heads around unified communications in the contact center.

However, it is an example of how quickly companies like Saleforce.com and Google are changing things and how fast companies need to adapt.

I’m curious if that makes you excited or nervous? Or both?

By the way, SAP hasn’t stayed in the background, it’s just that its contribution focuses on collaborative business process modeling, not CRM.

Here’s a list of the extensions and prototypes for Google Wave.

U.S. CIO joins DOD in backing SaaS for government

Vivek Kundra, the U.S. CIO, today said the federal government has created an online storefront for cloud-based applications.

 Kundra expressed excitement and optimism for deploying cloud-based applications in his blog:

Federal agencies and departments encounter many difficulties in deploying new IT services and products. Procurement processes can be confusing and time-consuming. Security procedures are complex, costly, lengthy and duplicative across agencies. Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.

Yet he also sounded a note of caution:

We are just beginning this undertaking, and it will take time before we can realize the full potential of cloud computing. Like with Data.gov, Apps.gov is starting small - with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services. Over time, as we work through these concerns and offer more services through Apps.gov, federal agencies will be able to get the capabilities they need to fulfill their missions at lower cost, faster, and ultimately, in a more sustainable manner.

 Apps.gov store. RightNow has also been instrumental in bringing government agencies on board with SaaS. In April, it released hosting capabilities to support the Department of Defense (DOD) and other civilian government and intelligence agencies that have stringent compliance and security standards.

Bill Ives lauded both RightNow and the federal government at the time. He wrote:

 I am pleased to see greater government uptake on the opportunities the cloud brings. There seems to be a genuine drive to balance security requirements with flexibility, cost savings and reduce unnecessary red tape with standardization.

 While at the Gartner CRM Summit this week, I had a chance to talk with Jason Mittelstaedt, CMO of RightNow, who said that providing an application secure enough for the DOD has helped allay the reliability and security concerns of many potential customers.

Yet, one attendee I spoke with at lunch still wondered how people are coping with security and privacy when it comes to SaaS. His company, a financial institution in the Midwest, is running Oracle CRM on-premise and has already invested in the infrastructure required to house the system. It is still nervous about SaaS.

SaaS vendors still have some convincing to do, but the stamp of approval from Kundra and the DOD should help.

Switching from Salesforce.com to Oracle On Demand and back again, how hard is it?

You know how those SaaS vendors say they have to continually strive to meet customer expectations because of how easy it is to just jump ship and turn their services off?

It might not be all marketing hype. Just look to one of the SaaS vendors themselves. As Larry Dignan blogged about a few weeks ago, SuccessFactors launched a Salesforce.com project, switched to Oracle On Demand and then switched back to Salesforce.com, a flip-flop Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was more than happy to mention on the company’s third quarter earnings call.

SuccessFactors, which provides on-demand employee management software, runs nearly all of its applications via the SaaS model, according to Paul Albright, chief marketing officer. Continued »

Gartner releases CRM market share report and SAP leads, but how much does it matter?

Gartner put out its estimates for the CRM market last week and SAP has the largest market share, according to the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

So what?

My general experience in covering the CRM market over the last several years the “leading” vendor in the market matters far more to financial analysts and the vendors themselves and than anyone buying or using the software. What matters to CRM buyers and users is that their vendor is viable, innovating the product Continued »

CRM videos: Glengary Glen Ross, the social customer and ball tossers

“Put the coffee down.”

I always loved that line, and that movie. I’m a fan of David Mamet’s in fact. So, when I came across a YouTube video the other day by Wallstrip spoofing the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengary Glen Ross, I thought it was worth passing along.

The video’s been around for a while, as have the others I’ve embedded here, but they’re definitely entertaining.

In fact, anyone involved with CRM 2.0 or curious about it has probably seen the advertiser/consumer bit from Microsoft Digital Advertising. It definitely makes its point, as does the SAP ball throwers.

Enjoy. Continued »

Steve Cakebread on SaaS, sales performance management

Steve Cakebread has seen a thing or two when it comes to the CRM market. He was chief financial officer at Autodesk before moving on to the same position at Salesforce.com, leading it through its initial public offering and eventually serving as president and chief strategy officer.

He is now chief financial officer at Xactly Corp.

He talked with SearchCRM.com about his career, the trajectory of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging market for sales performance management software.

In this 13-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and business professionals (particularly those in finance), Cakebread discusses:

• CRM’s biggest surprise
• The attraction of SaaS for CFOs
• The drivers for sales performance management software
• How sales performance management software is being purchased and who’s paying
• Why customers aren’t necessarily getting those kinds of features from their core CRM or SFA vendors.

 

 Standard Podcast [12:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Salesforce.com as ‘The Pusherman’

Today Salesforce.com is releasing a free edition of Force.com, its SaaS-based platform.

I was talking about it with Jo Maitland, executive editor of our new Cloud Computing site, who blogged about the SaaS platform release over on The Troposphere. She makes a good point. It’s an age-old trick. Offer up the first taste for free to get people hooked and then charge them for the rest.

Just like the pusherman we were warned about in elementary school. Continued »

Where’s SAP’s CRM message?

For a company that proclaims itself the leader in CRM, it sure didn’t have much to say about the subject at its recent Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP released its Business Suite 7, which includes a new CRM update, in February. But you wouldn’t have known it listening to the keynotes this week. While last year’s conference featured some significant news with SAP’s partnership with RIM to run SAP CRM natively on the BlackBerry, this year featured nary a word about CRM.

Continued »

Is Salesforce.com simply shifting its maintenance to partners?

Denis Pombriant has an interesting note on his blog today.

He says that effective today, Salesforce.com will start charging its partners for support.

Denis writes:

Effective May 1, 2009 and with a 60 day grace period, Salesforce.com will begin charging its developer partners for support.  I have not seen a press release but I have a data sheet on the offering.

And

The grace period starts today and the fees start July 1, 2009.  There will be three levels of service - Partner Premier, Partner Basic, Single Cases and Community.  Fees range from free to $24,000.

Given Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s pronouncement earlier this week of “The End of Maintenance” it would certainly appear that instead of turning to customers to boost its margins, Salesforce.com is instead turning to its partners. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and many an SAP executive have long maintained that the SaaS business model can be very difficult to turn a profit with. One would imagine it’s especially difficult if you can’t charge those maintenance fees of 22% of net licensing as Oracle has always done and as SAP will eventually do once it clears up these KPIs with SUGEN. Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet posted a blog entry yesterday citing research being conducted by Jason Carter noting that companies are no longer getting their money’s worth out of maintenance. He posts a chart showing a radical decline of research and design spend as a percentage of maintenance revenue.

Is Salesforce.com just shifting the costs?

Benioff joins the software maintenance fray

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the blogosphere over software maintenance fees this week.

The Salesforce.com CEO got things started when an internal corporate memo was “leaked” to members of the press and analysts, notably Vinnie Merchandani and Chris Kanaracus at NetworkWorld.

Here’s an excerpt from Benioff’s email:

Let me tell you about a customer that I met on our Cloudforce tour. This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center.  She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her.  That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology.  The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work.  She is paying tolls on a road to nowhere.

Continued »