Archive for September, 2009

Reshaping Business Intelligence

Reshaping Business Intelligence

A very good article from InformationWeek discussing the major technologies that are reshaping business intelligence.  What I found the most interesting was that the trends are now being driven primarily by the users of BI instead of traditionally the implementers of BI.  All the new technologes are helping to greatly reduce implementation times and speed up and increase the dynamic nature of the BI “experience.”   My favorite quote in the article is “With this technology, you get answers in a second, and that implies you also start asking questions out of curiosity.”  This is really the key, now users are empowered to explore and discover information about their business which before would have been nearly impossible.  A good read about the great things to come for BI.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under Business Intelligence, QlikView, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Cool CRM white papers from Redmound

We picked up some cool mostly CRM white papers today from our friends in Redmond.  The first is about the use of CRM and Social Media here.  Twitter me some CRM, baby.  The second is about why Bing is so cool compared to Google here.  This pitch may need to mature a bit, I fear.  The third one here is just some excel jujitsu, but that comes is handy as well, yes?

But the one I like the most here is about the business case for MS CRM, with a strong focus on sales force automation ROI, marketing automation ROI, and customer service automation ROI.

Good stuff, if you’re into CRM, check em out.  Or jujitsu, for that matter.  And if you’ve got fight-in’ reps that that to use spreadsheets, well, you’re in like flint.

- michael grollman

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am and is filed under crm, Marketing, Sales Strategy, Web 2.0 Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Threadsy & Crowd Fusion Spark Web 2.0 / CRM Interest

The TopCRM Vendors site had a nice write-up from TechCrunch50 this week on two new firms with Web 2.0 / CRM related offerings.  Both are start-ups.  The first is Threadsy, which allows CRM and other users to tap into a massive number of inbound and outbound social networks.  The second is Crowd Fusion, which takes features from wikis, blogs, and more to create a unified content management system.

Both are worth a look to be sure, if you enjoy the CRM / Web 2.0 mash-up world.  Check out the details here.

- Michael G

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under crm, Entrepreneur, Sales Strategy, Web 2.0 Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The Cloud Meets CRM: Stormy Weather Ahead for App Laggards?

(I found this on our sister blog  focused on cloud computing here, but there’s so much crossover, seemed like it should be here as well. – ed)

CRM vendors Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are moving aggressively forward with cloud deployment strategies and offerings, reports Nicholas Kolakowski and Darryl K. Taft respectively, both of eweek.com.

Kolakowski writes re: SalesForce that they “has rolled out Service Cloud 2, an update to its cloud-based customer-service platform. New features include a Google-accessible knowledge base, tools to filter information from the cloud and social networks to that knowledge base, and a full integration of Twitter into customer-service monitoring and response. Salesforce.com has been relying on both its Service Cloud and Sales Cloud to expand aggressively into the business cloud-computing arena.”

Taft identify takes note of the following: “Taking a page from the Salesforce.com playbook, SugarCRM has announced the availability of Sugar Community Edition on Amazon EC2 to provide CRM developers with an easy-to-deploy development environment in the cloud.” The availability of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for SugarCRM is especially interesting — it means that with virtually zero software license or capital infrastructure expense, organizations can have world class CRM, literally within a few hours of determining need.

Perhaps this accelerating re-ordering of the infrastructure world is driven by current economics? No telling where this migration of maj0pr apps to the cloud ends up, but its a safe bet that the hardware vendors for Amazon and like cloud vendors will be happier than ever with the direction and speed this wind is blowing.

Read more about Sugar on the Amazon Cloud here, and about SalesForce.com and its new cloud service extensions here.

- Michael G.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under crm, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The Cornerstone of CRM Deployment

Usability can be the linchpin between failure and success.

Sandeep Walia posted a well done piece the other day on a critical success factor for new CRM implementations, which still are failing at over a 30% rate in the market as a whole.  His point: get the usability side of it right.

Any business technology that affects groups and intended to make the group more productive is bound to the up against adoption issues — never is this moire true than with sales talent.  But unlike the accounts payable group, who are likely to quietly suffer under the burden of a poorly designed work flow, the sales team is well equipped the communicate the message of “this system is just terrible” and once that message catches fire, your CRM project will be hanging by a thread, to be sure. vsqp8t7d5m.

Read more here.

- Bob & Michael

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under crm, Sales Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.