In the CRM marketplace, speculation is swirling about hostile takeovers and mega mergers. Consolidation seems destined to place almost all of the market's power into the hands of a few well-known players.
Meanwhile, smaller CRM vendors are quickly -- and quietly -- disappearing. Consensus about the future of such firms is hard to come by: Some analysts claim many of today's survivors will thrive, while others already have consigned them to the junk heap. Lost in the shuffle are thousands of CRM customers who face the prospect of having to change vendors or lose support for solutions they currently use.
Will small, independent CRM vendors survive, or are they just pawns in the industry chess game, destined to be eliminated or subsumed by larger, more powerful players?..
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is getting more and more a key strategy for companies big and small. Customer care strategy and CRM software go hand in hand. In particular SMEs need a CRM software that easily adapts to their customer care needs while still being low cost. In this paper I discuss the benefits of CRM for SMEs and their special requirements wrt. CRM software. Further, I intro-duce the IST-project CARUSO whose objective is to provide SMEs with a software framework to implement low cost, customized CRM applications. This paper presents the rational behind the CARUSO project, the architecture of the framework, and the software development process used to build the framework...
This white paper will review existing CRM options from the small business perspective and examine the benefits that can be provided by a user-customizable CRM system...
Best Software's QuickStart is designed to help beginning CRM users quickly clear the initial hurdles that accompany any enterprise application deployment. The company's strategy is to home in on small and mid-size customers embarking on front-office automation projects or larger companies piloting the use of CRM for projects downstream.
Initiated in October 2001, QuickStart has developed a track record that enables SalesLogix to compete with other vendors that promise speedy CRM, such as Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) .
The QuickStart program enables users to implement Best Software's SalesLogix 6.0 in 30 days for a fixed, up-front price. Most customers use the plan to implement systems involving fewer than 20 users, the company says, but they have the option of purchasing additional seats after the application is up and running...
Microsoft has scrapped plans to launch its highly anticipated Microsoft CRM version 2.0 to make way for version 3.0. The double upgrade is part of the company's efforts to expand its presence into the small business market, after more than two years of focusing on the midmarket. The enhancement, Microsoft's most significant since it entered the CRM market in the first quarter of 2003, will be available to its roughly 4,000 existing customers in Q4 of 2005, and made generally available in Q1 of 2006. This comes about one year after version 2.0 was last intended to ship. Why abandon 2.0? According to Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM, skipping version 2.0 comes at the behest of partners and customers who preferred to wait for a more robust offering. Enter 3.0.To reflect the company's expanded focus on the SMB market, Microsoft CRM 3.0 will include a hosting option that enables customers to rent before they buy, Outlook integration, and marketing automation tools..
No industry segment seems to be in greater flux than that of the package software giants, merging and evolving and captivating the attention of businesses small and large. And arguably, there is no greater change taking place across the software world than what we are seeing in the areas of solutions designed for sales force automation and especially solutions linked to business intelligence.
With so much turnover in the software marketplace, a rather amazing thing is happening—or rather, happening again. Many companies are going back to the days of hiring developers to build custom products; only this time the products they seek are not designed to balance accounts receivable and payable. Their mission is to provide accurate, timely information to decision-makers across all strata of organizations. Organizations that live and die by the thing called Sales..
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) has announced its first move in what is likely to be a larger push into the content management space: the acquisition last month of Koral Technologies. Salesforce.com is leveraging the small company's technology and content management platform as the building block for Apex Content, its own content management initiative.
Apex Content is a major extension of the Salesforce platform, built specifically to create content-based applications .
Salesforce ContentExchange, the first application slated for Apex Content, is designed to help companies manage their unstructured data -- that is, data that resides anywhere in the enterprise except in a relational database...
Customer Lifecycle Management, or CLM, is often misunderstood to be the same principle idea as Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. Customer Lifecycle Management, however, has a key difference from CRM – the added factor of time. A fast approach & very brief definition of CLM is simply the measurement of your CRM program’s success over time – providing you have CLM metrics from before and after your CRM implementation...
[NOTE: This article is the first of a two-part series. The conclusion will appear in the May 2008 issue of CRM magazine.]Software-as-a-service (SaaS) seems to be everywhere lately, especially in the CRM space. For small and midsize businesses (SMBs), SaaS has been a popular option for a number of years; now larger enterprises are beginning to adopt it in meaningful numbers. SaaS, it can be said, is ready for you, no matter who you are. But are you ready for SaaS? To know the answer, we first have to examine SaaS in terms of functionality, data conversions, and systems integration. My next column will address two additional considerations: the support models and the economics for SaaS. Overall, a key theme will be the special considerations that SaaS poses for larger organizations.DefinitionSaaS, as many of you know, is Web-based software purchased on a subscription basis, allowing an organization to shift almost all technological responsibility to its vendor..
"In terms of new VoIP products, this is definitely the year of the small business,"
John Macario, president of Savatar, told CRM Buyer.
Macario has attended several VON Conference and Expos -- the voice-data industry's primary trade show -- over the years. At this year's show, now drawing to a close, he says he heard the words "SMB" and "VoIP" in the same sentence more often than at the three previous shows combined.
SMBs have emerged as an important end-user constituency for VoIP technology, Macario contends...
