December 30th, 2008
Social Plagiarism? Might Be, But SOOOO Stupid
Brent Leary is not only one of the more influential guys in the world of CRM but he is one of the nicest. He is a bright, insightful fun-loving and well-respected CRM guru who understands especially how the small business needs to use CRM and Social CRM. He has a wide audience for his wares including his well-regarded Social CRM blog (came in number 2 this year on the InsideCRM Best Blogs of 2008 to ahem, me with this one and PGreenblog - awarded yesterday. How self-serving is THAT!). He has a radio show/podcast called Technology for Business Sake AND he writes on the American Express Open Forum monthly with a look at what makes sense for CRM-interested companies. He has an upcoming e-book on the lessons of the Obama campaign for small business customer engagement. He is well liked everywhere with significant ties to both the CRM and social media worlds.
So, if one were going to plagiarize someone - wait. Let me make something abundantly clear here. Plagiarize something means to steal someone’s intellectual property - writing etc. and reproduce it, not only without attribution, but under your own (the thief’s) name. So, again. If one were to sink low enough to plagiarize someone, Brent doesn’t seem like he would make a smart candidate for plagiarism, now does he
Not to me it doesn’t. He has a long reach into a large base and everyone likes him and he is someone who actively participates in the use of the social tools like Twitter to converse with a large audience.
Yet, not only is that exactly what happened but the thieves went as far as to steal Brent’s material from his highest trafficked site - the American Express (AMEX) Open Forum. So not only were these thieves apparently unethical and immoral, and possibly, criminal or at least civilly liable, but they were really, really, really dumb.
The Story
The story behind this is pretty straightforward. About a week ago, A friend of Brent’s forwarded an email he had received with what seemed to be a mass email from a PR firm named LaForce+Stevens (the cutesy plus sign is theirs) which claims a really sexy, upmarket clientele among them Belvedere Vodka, Nautica, Reebok and Piaget. LaForce+Stevens sent out what seemed to be a mass “pitch” to an unclear client or set of clients or prospects to see how they felt about the pitch. They were pitching the pitch.
Until you read the pitch.
The pitch is Brent Leary’s entry - almost exactly as it was published on November 26, 2008 in the American Express Open Forum. It seems that our intrepid PR “experts” (expert at using someone else’s writing without attribution or payment, I guess) thought that by changing a few words they would somehow avoid comparisons or a possible lawsuit. Though, as far as I remember, not only is fair use limited to a couple of short paragraphs, but attribution is part of fair use too. Pretty sure I’m right about that one.
This is the LaForce +Stevens from now on referred to as LaFarce minus Stevens pitch email in comparison to Brent’s entry:
LaFarce minus Stevens “Pitch” Email
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Brent Leary’s AMEX Open Forum November 26, 2008 Posting |
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Winning Friends and Influencing People in a Web 2.0 WorldThere was a time when success could be measured by hard work and determination, when character could be read by the strength of one’s handshake, and when Dale Carnegie’s landmark book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” could be found on the bookshelf of every study across America. Times have certainly changed since 1937, the year Dale Carnegie penned the best-selling guidebook to assuming leadership and arousing enthusiasm among people. Success is now measured in wealth, and character is now measured not by the strength of one’s conviction, regardless of the consequences to themselves, but rather the strength of one’s conviction regardless of the consequences to others. Interestingly though, what has stood the test of time are the principles Dale Carnegie developed and laid out in 1937. In fact, not only have they stood the test of time, but with each modern advancement and technological breakthrough, they seem to become that much more influential. In fact, today’s modern technology has only amplified Carnegie’s philosophies, allowing them to impact more and more people than Carnegie himself could have ever imagined.Possibly the best example of an individual succeeding in winning friends and influencing people in a Web 2.0 world is none other than President-elect Barack Obama - a man who many feel just completed the most successful Internet marketing campaign ever.Here are a few ways Obama’s campaign fused Dale Carnegie’s original concepts with today’s Web 2.0 tools and strategies to effectively win and influence millions of people: |
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“Throw down a challenge” ~ Dale CarnegieAll political campaigns are ripe with sweeping statements from both parties that are likely contested. Obama’s campaign answered many of these contested statements with a site they put together - FightTheSmears.com. With this site they used audio, video, text and other kinds of content to address various statements to which they took exception. They also invited site visitors to report “smears” which they could then challenge.In reaction to those questioning his tax plan, The Obama Campaign launched a webpage with a tax calculator that visitors could use to calculate how his tax policy would impact their specific net income. It also included a YouTube video stating his tax policy, as well as widget people could put on their websites and blogs to which help spread his own policies virally. After the country was introduced to Joe the Plumber, the Obama campaign used Google Adwords to buy an ad for the term “Joe the Plumber” which when clicked on, led back to the tax calculator page. |
Throw down a challengeDuring the course of any political campaign a lot of statements are made that end up being contested. Obama’s campaign answered many of these contested statements with a site they put together - FightTheSmears.com. With this site they used audio, video, text and other kinds of content to address various statements they took exception to. They also invited site visitors to report “smears” in order to challenge them.The Obama campaign also challenged those questioning his tax plan by putting up a page on their site that had a tax calculator people could use to see how his tax policy would impact their net income. It included a YouTube video that stated his policy on the subject. It also included a widget people could put on their websites and blogs, which helped spread his policies in a viral fashion.And when the country was introduced to Joe the Plumber after his conversation with Obama on the subject of taxes, the Obama campaign used Google Adwords to buy an ad for the term “Joe the Plumber”. When you clicked on the ad you landed on the tax calculator page. |
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Dramatize your ideasThrough content created by his campaign, or through user generated content created on his behalf, Obama was able to express his ideas of hope and change in ways that captivated millions of people.His YouTube channel has over 1800 videos, accounting for over 20M views. His FlickR stream has thousands of photos. He posted his policies on document sharing sites like ScribD. The campaign also created an iPhone app that allowed people to organize their contacts by battleground states, provided campaign information, and helped find campaign events taking place in your area. The campaign even advertised on Xbox games like Burnout Paradise. |
Dramatize your ideasThrough content created by his campaign, or through user generated content created on his behalf, Obama was able to express his ideas of hope and change in ways that captivated millions of people. His YouTube channel has over 1800 videos, accounting for over 20M views. His FlickR stream has thousands of photos. He posted his policies on document sharing sites like ScribD. The campaign also created an iPhone app that allowed people to organize their contacts by battleground states, provided campaign information, and helped find campaign events taking place in your area. The campaign even advertised on Xbox games like Burnout Paradise. |
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Dale Carnegie 2.0President-elect Obama’s campaign is a living testament to the longevity of the teachings and concepts of Dale Carnegie. But they are also a testament to the power social media can have on building meaningful relationships with people we may have never met - and might not ever meet. Now it’s not likely that we as small business people will ever reach the scale and scope the Obama campaign operated on. But we don’t need to reach millions of people and raise hundreds of millions of dollars to be successful. We just need to figure out how we can use blogs, podcasts, social networks and other tools to make it easier for people to find us when they searching for help. |
Dale Carnegie 2.0President-elect Obama’s campaign is a living testament to the longevity of the teachings and concepts of Dale Carnegie. But they are also a testament to the power social media can have on building meaningful relationships with people we may have never met – and might not ever meet. Now it’s not likely that we as small business people will ever reach the scale and scope the Obama campaign operated on. But we don’t need to reach millions of people and raise hundreds of millions of dollars to be successful. We just need to figure out how we can use blogs, podcasts, social networks and other tools to make it easier for people to find us when they searching for help.We can thank Dale Carnegie and Barack Obama for showing us how we can do it. |
There are several things that astonish me about this:
- First, that a company with what seems to be an incredibly posh and brand-sexy client portfolio would stoop to what minimally seems to be unethical and immoral and even, possibly, legal plagiarism.
- That they didn’t think they’d get caught at this - this is the age of the social customer which an emphasis, a strong emphasis on the word and living concept - social. That means that peers talk to peers and the world of social media and CRM, while growing isn’t that huge - and is conversing via Twitter, email, IM of varying kinds, Facebook and other social networks, and unified communications tools ad infinitum on a virtually 24X7 basis. Someone was BOUND to see it who knows Brent and then tell him. Which is exactly what happened. How stupid can a PR firm be - or afford to be?
- PR firms are supposed to have creatives on staff. Apparently LaFarce minus Stevens doesn’t since they have to steal ideas from other people.
- That LaFarce minus Stevens is so….so…..crass that they would even think of doing this.
- That LaFarce minus Stevens is apparently thinking that because we live in an age of “open intellectual property” that they have the license to steal Brent’s well thought out work without compensation or even attribution - under their own name!
- That LaFarce minus Stevens hasn’t responded to anyone who has contacted them or to Brent with even an apology to Brent.
Is this plagiarism? I’ll have to leave that to a court to decide. But what it is is unethical and immoral and worthy of contempt. If I were a client of LaFarce minus Stevens - and in the interests of full disclosure, NO WAY AM I -I would be seriously concerned about their creative capabilities and now, apparently, their honesty.
What do you guys think about this?
December 22nd, 2008
CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Part Tree, er…Three
To Recap
We’re heading into the homestretch. Which is why the Giants need to beat the Panthers….last night. Oh, snap. This isn’t my NFL blog. I don’t have one. This is the final episode in that hilarious sitcom, Greenberg’s Fools Gold. For those of you who missed the previous episodes, here are the links:
Episode 1 - In which Greenberg identifies the trends in CRM that are both mobile and social - though he’s not talking about Paris Hilton’s posse. Or Perez Hilton’s blog.
Episode 2 - In which Greenberg identifies the trends in CRM that involve honesty, openness, social influence and the cloud - and didn’t hire Susan Lucci to play the lead.
Episode 3 - In which Greenberg writes about what he forgot in 1 and 2 - including….feedback 3.0 and……uhhhhh…..mmmmm. I can’t remember the rest. Let me know if you remember.
Episode 4 - In which Greenberg talks about the BB4 CRM companies and how big and bad they are - and aren’t. Oh BTW, BB4 stands for, guess what….Big, Bad 4.
Episode 5 - In which Greenberg talks about the not as big but maybe as bad (in the sense of “good” and “bad”) companies and how not as big they are but may become…or something like that. Did I say anything coherent?
Now Presenting: The Up and Coming Companies of 2009 Social CRM/CRM 2.0 Space
These companies are the ones that you just might not know but must be on your 2009 CRM social calendar or 2009 Social CRM radar screen. I insist - which means “please?” Each of them is a genuine gem - in the case of Helpstream, I can’t even find a flaw. Don’t worry though, that’s way too out of character since I’m a New Yorker. I will. In the meantime. enjoy all of them - they are actually interesting in addition to being on the rise. Real studmuffins and for the most part, outright cool.
- InsideView - This is a company that just figured out how the world of CRM and business knowledge (not BI) intermingle when it comes to traditional competitive intelligence and the social information needed to know the customer. They have this kick-butt product called SalesView in three editions (the basic one is free, the other two are $99.00 per month per user) that draws competitive and profile information from some 20,000 sources ranging from Reuters to Facebook. But it doesn’t just provide that information to you in some unstructured way. For example, it can do what the folks at InsideView call “Connection Analysis” so you can identify who the key influencers are at the companies that you are targeting. So what? Social Network Analysis does that? Yeah, but not from 20,000 places including the oft used Reuters and Hoovers but also Jigsaw, Facebook, LinkedIn and a myriad of other social networks. It then actually does the analysis and provides you with an extensive view of who’s who. Cool, salesguy, huh? But it goes so much further - best target market sales prospects, repeatable alerts for events of interest or importance to you. Oh, it just goes on. Their very bright management team comprised of industry veterans like Rand Schulman, realized that CRM was a natural integration for these extended social services so they partnered not just with the usual - salesforce.com, but with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, Oracle (in their on demand incarnation, and Landslide (see below for Landslide). They are deeply rooted and involved. Their service is invaluable - and most of all is cool without being there to be cool. They are an incredibly capable provider of intelligence that sales and marketing folks can use - with a business and pricing model that works. What do they need to do better? I’ll let you know. Right now, they need to just keep on keepin’ on.
- Helpstream - This is my paradigm company for a CRM 2.0 feature set. Para-digm. They seem to have it all together. They are the ones that I use as the example of the difference between CRM 2.0 and Web 2.0. They are my numero uno for explaining the difference between CRM 2.0 and Web 2.0 Their focus is customer service. They incorporate the social functionality needed to involve the customer community in solving customer service issues and also to monitor and capture the feedback they get from the customers. But to make it truly a CRM 2.0 application, they incorporate analytics, business rules and workflow to make sure that customer service activity in the community is not only monitored and analyzed (in a left and right brained a.k.a. whole brained way), but that the responsible company staff members are notified when situations appear - those situational responses are triggered and then flagged due to a business rule, workflow routes the flagged occurrence to the selected authority and that person is notified to take action in some way. Perfecto. But besides their well executed apps, they have a smart strategy - they are currently allied with Oracle and I’m sure they aren’t going to stop there. They would be remiss if they did. Watch these guys. They are what CRM 2.0 is. Big time up and comer in 2009. If any practitioner company has a brain.
- Connectbeam - Somehow, which I will explain, Connectbeam has been successful yet stayed under the radar and remained cutting edge at the same time - roughly akin to me trying to juggle even one ball. Since they’ve been under the radar more or less for their existence, I’ll bring out my sonar instead and enlighten you as to what they do and who they are and why they are so important to the CRM 2.0 space. They provide an enterprise strength social collaboration application that comes in two flavors - a software only version and, the thing that puts them on my list - an integrated hardware appliance that can handle up to 150,000 users. The services are what you are likely to come to have expected from social software - industrial strength social tagging and social bookmarking capabilities integrated with ranking, comments, and ratings. They have hooks to integrate with Google, Sharepoint, Confluence, Outlook and Jive Clearspace. That means, for example when you do a Google search, not only will you see the search results, but also the related tags, the related bookmarks and the importance of the related content according to the “collective intelligence” of the enterprise/users behind it. They do this in an elegant way too, with some customizable capabilities, such as limiting the tag cloud results to the content that created over the last, say, three weeks. You can expand or constrain it. Connectbeam management has a good management team and board of directors behind it. Led by CRM (Oracle and PeopleSoft to be exact) industry veteran Puneet Gupta, they have also had the input from Web 2.0 legend Thomas Vander Wal. This meant they have what is likely the best social tagging engine that exists today. One thing that perplexes me, given the CEO’s CRM background is the lack of integration with any CRM applications since this set of tools and the integrated appliance is made for companies using CRM who want to extend to CRM 2.0, or, at least, add social tools/networks to their CRM toolbox. Their pricing is reasonable $29/user per year (yes, per year). Remember, if you’re wondering why so inexpensive, they are aimed at the big boys - large enterprises. That’s why they scale to 150,000 - because they can and they target those kinds of companies. Watch them. They will start to radar up (I made the phrase up) in 2009 - and they should.
- Zuora - Technically, this isn’t a CRM company. But it is a SaaS-based billing and payments service developed by Tien Tzuo, the former Chief Strategy Officer at salesforce.com. So, after consultation with a team of lawyers and engaging a research team of hundreds, I’ve concluded that its within my rights to focus on them as one of the companies to watch in 2009. What they do is something that has even more value in a recession than it did prior to that recession. They provide billing (Z-Billing) and payment (Z-Payment) services to companies that have recurring payments models, whether that company is large or small. Currently, they are integrated with salesforce.com. But they’ve allied with Boomi On Demand, which has a technology that provides a pre-integrated capability with CRM and financial services packages done with one click from the web. Needless to say, (so I’ll say it) that pre-integration simplifies things - which then increases the speed of Zuora product enablement in situations when integration is needed. A smart technology partnership, and reflecting multiple smart moves that Zuora is making. Zuora is also well funded - recently getting a second round of $15 million, bringing their total funding to $21.6 million - with both Marc Benioff and Benchmark Capital among the funders - great names to have in addition to the money. They have a solid model, priced to go, fill a market need, are as easily integrated with other SaaS apps as can be and a great CEO who knows how to be one. I hope that they become a little more active in figuring out how to integrate with some of the SMB CRM vendors SaaS apps and I even have a thought for a new service related to it, but that’s left to another day. This day, I’m saying watch Zuora in 2009.
- LucidEra - Founder Ken Rudin and CEO Rob Reid are both CRM industry veterans with combined Oracle, Siebel, Upshot and salesforce.com senior management experience. So when they developed the SaaS business intelligence product they provide, needless to say, CRM was never far from their minds. That’s why, if you see what they provide, they give you lead, pipeline and order insight - all CRM related analytics and have three versions - one of which is devoted to salesforce.com and the other to Oracle Order Management - which of course is right at the heart of many CRM applications functionality. The other version, if you happened to wonder, is “Enterprise” which includes ERP and Excel spreadsheet data with the CRM data. So, the CRM pedigree here is strong. Their outlook is to provide considerably less expensive BI services to small and medium companies. They understand that because they are competing with giants like Cognos (IBM), Hyperion (Oracle) and Business Objects (SAP), that they have to be “different” - in a nice way of course. That means not only providing a basic model that keeps it simple for the SMBs, but also providing some business leadership in the world of BI so that the SMBs can begin to understand the marketplace and the value of BI. In fact, Ken Rudin has his own forecast for the 2009 BI world here. What makes their model appealing is that they know their market, they focus on it, and they provide services of genuine value tailored to the market - which means basic services that are meaningful - not a lot of customization. But its what the SMB companies need. LucidEra provides it and in a time of transformation, getting what you need to either participate in that transformation or weather it, is comforting. Watch these guys.
- Infusionsoft - Infusionsoft is hardcore marketing automation…so they say. They don’t have a lot of social bells and whistles. They do have a complete suite of marketing and sales tools in the realm of CRM, despite their best efforts to distance themselves from CRM earlier this year. They are absolutely solid when it comes to companies in the below 75 employees range. Probably no one better that I know in the market. What’s interesting to me about them is that they are also ambitious in a cautious kind of way and while not offering social tools to the 75 or less small businesss, they use them to engage the 75 person or less small business. They have an Infusionsoft customer community that is active and lively and engaged. They use the community to solicit feedback, to create opportunity for peer engagement and to create conversation or just let them occur. They use Twitter for customer outreach and to engage analysts and other influencers. In other words, a marketing automation company that actually drinks its own Kool Aid and does what it recommends to others to do. They have a young and solid management team and are poised to take off. One interesting aspect of their offering is that they see sales and marketing as extensions of each other - a unified duo. They might see it as marketing with sales subsumed. Others might see it the other way. Doesn’t matter at this point. I think they’re right about the integration of the two. In fact, in the new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ve combined the sales and marketing chapter into one after a suggestion from my dear friend and uberanalyst Denis Pombriant and a lot of reflection. Infusionsoft presents their SaaS applications that way. They have reasonable pricing and a substantial clientele to act as a foundation for their future growth. What I’m glad to see is that their earlier attempt to declare CRM “dead” is removed from their website. The reason I’m glad? ‘Cause CRM isn’t dead. They still claim they aren’t CRM but truth be told - they are. Once they clean up their message a little, they are going to go far - and that will come in 2009 because small businesses under 75 employees will like what they see.
- Really Simple Systems - This is one that jumped onto my radar in midyear and that I’ve been following ever since. This is tailored specifically for the small end of the small business market, and, as its name implies it is designed to be simple for small business. Not only is the interface an easy one to use, but the pricing model, business model and technology model (SaaS) are entirely coherent with simplicity and small business. Even CEO John Paterson’s attitude is coherent with the small business universe. He’s laid back, doesn’t sweat the large stuff - and believes that useful capabilities not feature/function overload drives customer benefit. Plus he’s got that extraordinarly droll British wit. When you buy Really Simple’s CRM service, you turn on the functionality you want (Oh, my god!) - and you can have as much or as little as you want. Of course, for those industry veterans out there, you know that this is shocking. Normally, you have to turn off functionality. The pricing is model is….different. It is $45/user - customization and installation cost included in that. If you have 1-4 users, you get the sales module. But they have all three of the usual suspect CRM modules in the portfolio. If you have 5-9 users, 2 of the modules; 10 or more - all three. If you fall short of the user criterion, you can have another module for your users at $45/mo - not per user - a blanket amount. The applications themselves have an easy to use interface and they have available the functionality inherent in any good SMB CRM suite. They are targeted at the 5-200 seat market and, at least according to themselves, they are the UK’s largest hosted SMB CRM provider - and they are coming to the U.S. in the very near future. Their future plans also include the provision of SOAP APIs and pre-built links to other hosted systems. I have to tell you, they may (though I need to hedge and say “may”) have the best SMB CRM application out there. It really is simple and yet fully capable. Big stuff for this company that numbers the British Library and Royal Academy of the Arts among its customers. I like them, I really like them.
- Jigsaw - Jigsaw not only has a really good product - but they have the “I’m going to seize the initiative” leadership smarts too. The latter first. In June 2008, they announced the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative which gave members of the initiative free access to integrate Jigsaw data, which includes over 10 million business contacts and over a million company records into their applications data stores. Members of the JODI are Landslide, salesforce.com, Maximizer, SugarCRM, Oracle, NetSuite and Sage. Jigsaw also released a Web Open API that could be used to integrate Jigsaw data with other CRM applications, not already partners. This was a brilliant move on Jigsaw’s part. But the question remained then, how is Jigsaw going to make $$$? Well, that was covered too. There are a lot of companies that don’t use the JODI partners nor are they members of the Open Data Initiative themselves. They still pay monthly subscription fees ranging from $25/mo. to a customized fee. The value of 10 million complete business records and the data for 1 million companies is pretty much incalculable. The way they got the data…different. They have a community of 450,000 members and many corporate clients who provide it in return for access to the data for free. That means that I can download my contact file to Jigsaw and get the data I want in return. Which of course, brings up the diciest part of their model. Not only don’t I think I have the right to treat someone else’s information as a commodity, I wouldn’t do it. It makes me uncomfortable to think about that. Does this means of collecting information work? Is it ethical? Apparently enough people think so to give them an astounding amount of data that they can provide for free or sell. That said, they are making some brilliant moves and while I have some doubts about their model’s long term success, I think they are poised to go up in 2009. And I think that their Open Data Initiative is a strategic artwork.
- Neighborhood America - Neighborhood America is smart, strategic, and has an evangelist, Kim Kobza, who thinks big at the helm. Their ELAvate platform is probably one of the best developed social networking platforms in the industry. It has a number of standout features - a highly attractive interface, a video chat function that can handle what is effectively private (or public) videoconferencing for up to six users - that in addition to all the standard stuff that you would expect of a social network platform - threaded discussions, communities of interest and practice; rich media; user generated content integration through uploading media plus commenting and ranking. They have a client list in the entertainment and media world to die for -ABC, CBS and Fox News among many others. They have a Board of Directors that is committed not just to the future profitability of Neighborhood America - though that too - but to the vision and they have an exciting, technology-forward, open corporate culture with an incredible number of hardworking, attractive, accomplished staff. To their credit, they’re working hard on CRM integration with at least 3 of the BB4 to begin with - which is more than I can say for most of the social network platforms. In fact, I think that the Lithium/RightNow integration is one of the few that are out there - and Lithium isn’t strictly a platform. In other words Neighborhood America has a lot going for it. Do they have flaws? Sure they do. They could change their marketing strategy a bit. They could improve some of their blogging and social media platforms a bit from the technology standpoint. And one or two other things. But this is a company poised for breakout. Watch ‘em do it in 2009 or 2010. Its gonna happen sooner than later.
- Silverpop - Silverpop has already been a leader in the world of innovative email marketing which, needless to say, falls in the CRM space - especially because the marketing model that they’ve developed their applications and services for is built around customer engagement. But rather than rest on their laurels as a leader in this space, they’ve instead decided to take the next step to fall in lockstep with the empowered customers that businesses now face. What drives them to this list of companies to watch is a simple set of buttons to click. Its a new feature called Share-to-Social and it literally allows you to do just that. Take an HTML email that you’ve received and with Share-to-Social activated you can share the email to Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other social networks. Pretty nifty. What makes this smart is that it makes an email viral and the buttons are embedded into what can be hundreds of thousands of emails - a smart move if there ever was one. People love sharing these days in case you hadn’t noticed. What makes this a particularly valuable feature is that the results can be tracked. Yeppers. They can be tracked. This is a highly respected company that can handle high volumes of email that is more than share-to-social buttons. They have thousands of customers and their CEO, Bill Nussy is a technology industry influencer. In other words, they have chops. They are making some tentative steps in the social CRM right direction. Though tentative, they are well worth watching in 2009 - if they continue to take more steps.
- Aplicor - I have had a secret love affair. Yes, I have - with Aplicor. They are a company that does SaaS smartly and well. They understand how SaaS works in the commercial realm, yet play strongly in the public sector with one of the largest SaaS user implementations in the federal government. They have power house feature sets in both sales and customer service applications though not much to speak of when it comes to marketing (but to their defense, no one is much to speak of beyond a few rising stars who concentrate on marketing). They are targeted at the midmarket so their typical seat count for a customer isn’t the usual SaaS 5-25 but 160. They have a solid management, with CEO Chuck Schaefer a clearly 2.0 knowledgeable guy who has a genuinely insightful blog to prove it. They get thought leadership. Another principal Pete Koltis is a longtime industry veteran who ran major practices at companies like Arthur Andersen (that would be the consulting side of AA and a PeopleSoft practice.). They have won countless awards ranging from the TMC.net Software Excellence awards (5 times) to the Computerworld Green IT company of the year in 2007. There are too many others to mention. On the technical side, they have not only delivered an amazing full service back office (accounting) and front office (CRM) product, but they’ve had, catch this, 100% server uptime for 4 years in a row. This is a seriously good company. Yet, they are not only making my list for the first time but they seem to be traveling under the radar - even with lots of press releases and awards. What gives? I don’t know exactly. Regardless, they really need to step up their public visibility and engage in more of the contemporary marketing vehicles like Twitter, Facebook, etc. - which I know they understand. But they don’t use much. They should do something to be more visible. Just don’t tell my wife. This is a company ready to explode - in a good way. Watch them very closely.
MidYear Review For These Puppies
Just a quick list of companies that I either don’t have on my radar screen long enough or companies that should be on the watch list but remain speculative because of something that stands in their way - though correctable.
- Landslide - They’re interesting. They are a step beyond traditional CRM sales force automation. They introduce a more effective buyer engagement methodology that come with sets of interactive tools. They aren’t just data driven, they are buyer driver. They aren’t quite in the social realm that we keep talking about. They take the requisite swipe at CRM and SFA in what seems to be necessary in the world of sales product differentiation. I think that’s silly, but I think they are something that I might want to reckon with. I just don’t know about them. I know that my bud and SMB CRM analyst Brent Leary likes them and that’s a great start.
- Unica - They are making huge progress on the marketing 2.0 front, including analytics but they are just back (a week ago) on my radar for the first time in two years so we’ll have to wait and see. I’m juiced though to see what they’re doing.
- Eloqua - They’d be on the companies to watch list, but their pricing concerns me - they are easily the most expensive marketing application. And, for those unaware of it, like maybe most of the athletes in professional sports, we’re in a recession. Pricing, even to an enterprise, is a consideration. But Eloqua has unmatched quality in traditional and some innovative marketing automation for the enterprise. So we’ll see.
- CastIron - I know their model for Enterprise applications as an appliance works and they have a great set of relationships with the CRM vendors, like salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft. They also have recently added a “cloud” to their arsenal so that they have a SaaS driven hardware appliance with a “cloud backbone.” But I just don’t know them well enough to put them in the list above. I’d love to, but let’s see what happens by midyear.
- Marketo - Again, an interesting 2.0ish SaaS marketing application - I just have no traction with them yet. I see them around, but have never spoken with them. But they are doing enough to interest me.
- EBSuite - I’ve known them for several years, and as a small business marketing suite, they are very, very good. But I’ve had no interaction with them for over a year.
- Infor (Epiphany) - Since Epiphany (they finally dropped the stupid period between the e and the p), was scarfed up by SSA and SSA was then snorted up by Infor, Epiphany has turned into one giant mystery to me. They had a great customer interaction engine for a long time - class of the industry.I have to emphasize had here because I have no idea what it is now - its been more than 3 years since I’ve heard a thing about them except in occasional releases. They are deep in the recesses of Infor.
- Vtiger - I just completed a serious review of the open source CRM applications for TechTarget (I’ll provide a link when its actually out) and, while I think SugarCRM has no real competition as of yet, Vtiger might be the one to show up. They have over 1.5 million downloads of their CRM suite, far eclipsing all the other other non-SugarCRM open source vendors. In fact, they may eclipse them all combined. They are owned by Adventnet, who also owns Zoho, who you saw highlighted in the last entry on Companies to Watch. They seem to be very smart. I simply don’t know enough to put them in the heavyweight list of up and comers above. However, that doesn’t rule them out by midyear. I’m watching them closely.
- nGenera - They totally intrigue me. They are the first “social” company to buy a CRM company - Talisma. They bought Talisma for their customer interaction engine, though. In fact, they recently solid Talisma’s CRM business to Campus Management. They operate primarily with a rollup strategy - acquiring the pieces they need to offer a truly social CRM/Enteprise 2.0 product suite that covers the gamut of the customer experience. I like these guys very much but need to see how they do in a bad economy before they go into my final list. That’s just natural caution I always have when the strategy is rollup.
- SkyData - This is a company that has the mobile smarts and a proven MAJOR veteran of the CRM world, Kevin Nix running it. They are mobile, multi-platform and are doing the social CRM thing by linking personal information to CRM system customer data. They interconnect between Facebook, Jigsaw, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft, Siebel and NetSuite. Jeez. I just need to see it work well for a bit and I’m sold. But I need to see it work well. With Kevin Nix there, it will and I will. I’m awaiting.
- Angel.com - Even though they’ve been around since 1999, they may be the first company I’ve seen that actually can provide a genuinely personalized customer experience with a call/contact center. They’ve got 1500 corporate clients. I’m impressed but waiting and seeing. I mean, I spoke to them today. I’ve known of them since 1999 though But I haven’t spent nearly enough time, obviously. But they are very intriguing.
- Loyalty Lab - I love what they are doing around marketing platforms that focus on customer engagement and integration with communities as their model. But I don’t see them out there enough - even though I’m highlighting them in the 4th edition of the book. Six months will tell me what I need to knowl.
- SocialText - Why consider them in a CRM technology company review? After all SocialText is the leading enterprise wiki provider in the world, not a CRM company per se. BUT. BUT. BUT….in the fall of 2008, they launched their SocialText Social Publishing platform which seems to have customer engagement at its core. But they don’t integrate with CRM worth a damn so I’m not sure about whether I’d give them the total thumbs up in a CRM context. For social tools - a two fisted hands up. But CRM wait and see.
- Atlassian - These guys, depending on who you talk to, are either the #1 or the #2 enterprise wiki company. I’m in the #1.5 camp. I give a bit of an edge to SocialText, due to market presence and better looking tools, but these guys are miles ahead of SocialText when it comes to the integration of their world class Confluence wiki product and their JIRA help desk management product with CRM applications. They are know to integrate with salesforce.com, Siebel, Vtiger, and several others. That alone puts them at the Social CRM forefront.They have a devoted set of advocates who swear by (not at) Confluence and, all in all, they have 13,300 corporate customers that use their products. For the world I inhabit, they are probably too project focused but because they make no claims about being a CRM product, that’s fine with me. But it also makes me hesitate about putting them on the list. I’ll let you know.
Some Random Final Thoughts
Whew. That’s it for the sixth and final post in the 2009 Nostradamus Series on ZDNET. I’m going to be settling down to a more reasonable length in my posts - oh and adding graphics too once I can ask somehow how to do that. Its been a pleasure - an excruciating and time consuming pleasure doing these forecasts and company watch lists. I’m sure that there are dozens of companies I could have included and I’m sure that someone hates my choices. For example, someone told me that I should have included Onyx - and someone else - Pivotal. Here’s the dealio on them. Pivotal is owned by CDC. Onyx is owned by M2M. As long as they are owned by either of those two companies, I will never cover either company because I dislike the way that those companies operate. M2M carried out a bloodbath against the team at Onyx at the time of the acquisition. That ended any interest I have in covering this company. Why? Because they treat employees like objects to be discarded and that doesn’t work for me - business decision or not. So no Onyx and no Pivotal for similar reasons though different circumstances.
Hey. This is my selection of what I think. I hope that you think they are valuable. But I will say, regardless, my principles matter to me. So those I have covered or am interested in, to the best of my knowledge, are honorable and ethical and a company that I have no problem associating my thinking with or writing about.
Have a wonderful holiday no matter which you celebrate. Its an honor to be able to write for you.
December 16th, 2008
CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Second Verse, Different Than the First
Industry Giants -the New Adults on the Block
Most of these might not be surprising to you but they are to me. With maybe the exception of Sage…and NetSuite….and RightNow and…..ah well. I guess they aren’t really all that surprising. But to some degree, IBM and Cisco are surprising. Remember, I write about CRM and Social CRM and really, in the past, when push comes to shove, neither of these two have been obvious CRM heavyweights. Oh, I suppose the case could be made that IBM was a significant player in the consulting world on CRM - that would be an easy thing to do - but then I’d have to talk about Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as a……hmmmmm. I think I….won’t.
I’d rather just get moving on this one before I get any more confused.
- IBM - IBM has always been a player in CRM - but through IBM Global Business Services, their consulting arm, not their software or applications groups. Their CRM applications built on Lotus Notes, were, to be charitable, so-so. That’s really charitable. But, I think we’ve pretty well established that CRM has changed dramatically - at least in my Hollywood-stricken eyes. We’ve moved from customer management to customer engagement as the means to provide the experiences that customers are now looking for from companies. That means when it comes to the supporting technology, IBM is in good position, because social software becomes increasingly important to the software schema that CRM applications should be providing. This is where IBM does itself pretty proud. They’ve innovated with the only social software full suite on the market - Lotus Connections and, with the release of version 2.0, got it right - notwithstanding an odd design decision or two (like for example, why they’ve chosen what I have to call a truncated wiki like collaboration space called activities when a wiki service would probably do what activities do and allow for more. Just because they used activities in their own work environment doesn’t make it the commercially correct thing to do). But, honestly, a feature quibble isn’t that big a deal - given how far IBM has come over the past two years as super-player in what is the new Social CRM/CRM 2.0 space. One of their greatest strengths has been a long standing one. A powerful global CRM consulting group stretching from the U.S. to India to Colombia to pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Their CRM practice is not only among the best in the consulting world, but has a voracious appetite to stay on top of trends and practices and on top of the market. Plus, IBM HQ has a number of corollary organizations devoted to innovation, change and thought leadership that make it a highly visible, outspoken institution. For example, they have the IBM Institute for Business Value or the Institute for Electronic Government. More germane to CRM and further proof that that IBM GBS gets it, in September 2008, IBM launched a CRM Center of Excellence for SaaS. Around the same time they launched the Center for Social Software. All of this is part of their Tomorrow at Work initiative - a brilliantly conceived look at how the future of business and work is going to look. A month later a Cloud Services Initiative was launched. Internally they use hundreds, maybe thousands, of blogs and wikis, communities and rich media to carry out their daily business on a collaborative basis. There is no stopping the institutionalization of thought leadership and innovation at IBM. But the development of a solid though a wee bit flawed social software suite in combination with their CRM consulting expertise, is what starts IBM catapulting to the top of the CRM pantheon. Is this a perfect scenario? No. The integration of CRM and social software at IBM is still in the hands of IBM partner iEnterprise who announced the integration between Connections and iEnterprise’s CRM software in September. That has to be corrected. For them to lead the way in the concrete world of CRM 2.0, their internal integration of the social apps with the CRM offerings of their global consulting group - be it Siebel or SAP or Oracle or some new and better Lotus Notes-based CRM application - is a necessity. The theoretical foundation will be there in the new releases of Notes and Domino expected to be out in the near future which is supposedly will be fully integrated with Connections 2.0. But CRM will be the kicker for them, not the social tools. For IBM to play at the level they normally do elsewhere and be mentioned in the CRM-smelling breath with Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and salesforce.com, they have to take their usual lead and make sure they have those integrated tools to offer and to use. They have everything else.
- SAS - As large as the privately-held SAS is ($2.15 billion in revenue in 2007) and as great a place as they are to work (always among the lowest turnover rates in any industry and voted among best places to work by everyone), I had to hesitate before including them here - which might seem a little churlish. This is a company whose revenue went up 15% last year, more driven by partners than ever before. They increased their customer base by 1,100 - a great number. They consistently hit the quadrants in the Business Intelligence and in the Multichannel Campaign Management category as a leader, according to Gartner. So that would seem to be amazing right? But I still had to hesitate - though here they are. They To get into this list, I have to think that a company is going to play big time in 2009, and as much as I like these guys, I’m not 100% sure of that. But I am convinced enough to make them a tenuous choice. To their credit, They have three distinguished CRMish applications that are clearly excellent - their Marketing Automation application, which, while headlined by Campaign Management, is much larger than that. It additionally includes Marketing Mix Management (this is the former Veridiem, which had an office in an old warehouse with amazingly high ceilings in the Boston area, many moons ago) Marketing Performance Management, Web Analytics and a host of others; their Customer Experience Analytics are smart and capable While not terribly pretty, the interface is more than serviceable. They even have a whole series of products including marketing automation, marketing mix management and business intelligence that they offer on demand. They have staff members who are both incredibly smart and incredibly personable. Some of the more “radical” among them are making prodigious and good use of social tools like Twitter & Facebook for more than personal reasons - and doing their company a service. They have Better Management.com, a well organized highly practical site with “what to do’s” everywhere including a Web TV show called Better Management Today that I’ve happily appeared on twice. But I have this nagging problem that I’ve had for years with them. I have heard for years that they are changing their marketing approach and positioning to suit the actual marketplace and not the imagined one they have - which seems to be one left over from William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” of the 1950s and maybe the early 60s. Watch Madmen on AMC if you’re not old enough to remember the era. I just don’t see the necessary changes in their marketing strategy or even creative work. About two years ago, I was in a meeting at SAS where I saw a highly original & creative product of planned changes to their marketing which only got crushed up the chain somewhere. This year I didn’t see anything that told me that they’re fully adopting to contemporary marketing requirements - which, when it comes to a technology company riding a wave that the customers control, can become a serious problem. That said, they still are a company that operates on the strength of its products and the viability of its environment - and for that alone, they make the list - this year.
- Cisco - This is the company that’s the biggest surprise and the least surprise. For the last two years, the company positioning itself as “the human network” - and using one of my favorite songs in the world - Baba O’Riley by The Who (also used on CSI:NY) for the marketing - has been placing itself into position of being an all purpose end to end set of applications, hardware, software and process engines for engaging the social customer. Not only did they link up with Oracle CRM on demand via their WebEx organization in 2007, but they’ve been building and modifying a “Unified Call Connectors” for integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or salesforce.com since 2006. But it goes so much further than that. Oh so much further. In 2007, Cisco purchases two social networking properties - FiveAcross, a socnet platform and tribes.net - more of a community aggregation site. These acquisitions led to their announcement at the end of 2007 of Eos - an entertainment operating system - that’s designed to deliver rich media experiences across communities. In February this year, The Sports Museum of America announced their use of Eos. Even better, the Yankees are using Cisco as the technology backbone to power the fan experience at their new stadium using some remarkable innovative future-looking fan friendly mobile, high def and interactive capabilities - which for me would be enough to declare them “king of the hill, top of the heap.” (who can guess what this refers to? Be Yankees specific please. The first one to leave it as a comment will get a free copy of the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light when it comes out in August) But of course, sigh, that isn’t enough. But there is so much more to Cisco’s play. They have succeeded quickly with Cisco Telepresence - a phenomenally well done holographic sort of technology that allows meetings between any groups in the world from any locations in what seems to be projection a la holodeck. It has been wildly successful. Check out this video for a mindblowing look at it. But Telepresence and the Yankees, while incredibly cool, isn’t the reason they’re included. Under the aegis of John Chambers, they’ve organized their company culture and structure to make sure that each employee not only has access to management but are empowered to present ideas and follow through on problem solving both internally and externally. They have a democratic culture that actually is organized around innovation. They emphasize organic leadership for that innovation and encourage the use of social media and social networking tools to facilitate that leadership. They understand their internal customer - the employee - as well as they understand their external customer. Their number 1 ranked internal blog is about collaboration. The combination of this open and democratic culture, the positioning as a leader in the “human network,” the integration of Oracle CRM on on demand into their portfolio and their obvious interest in CRM via the Unified Call Connectors, their social networking acquisitions and how they’ve integrated them both into their portfolio and into their day to day corporate culture, and of course, we can never forget their dominance of the enterprise router business, position these guys as a company we could see emerge in 2009-2010 as a significant leader in social CRM. My only concerns in that regard are that as of now, these don’t seem to be part of a coherent strategy to be a leader in world of the “customer engagement” infrastructure. They are just pieces of a puzzle that happen to fit. So perhaps, Cisco is content with doing all this to be the #1 player in the $50 billion router business - and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. But if they seecan se how thewhole puzzle fits together (not just the pieces) and can present the vision - they could be a major surprise for the likes of SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft, etc. We’ll see, but watch what they do in 2009. If not what I think, the ride will be really, really cool anyway.
- Sage - For years, Sage former Sage Software formerly Best Software formerly SalesLogix was perplexing. They had a good product in SalesLogix for the small and midsized world - especially the lower to mid -end of that. No one doubted its functionality. They had a strong partner program - in fact as far back as 2000, their partners drove 86% of their SalesLogix revenue. They were attempting to provide some thought leadership in the SMB world, though I can’t say a lot. But some. All in all, they had been a player since the late 90s in CRM - and they’ve always been to some extent since. But there was something…off…. about them. It was never that hard to figure out what was wrong. Their strategies in the past had been somewhat pedestrian. They suffered an occasional serious misstep. They even attempted to play in the enterprise world at one point, though they dropped that and its architects within about a year of the idea. But at the high level, this ordinary strategies and a lack of vision - or at least, even an obvious vision - led them astray. For one, it kept them pitching ACT! as a CRM application. For another, it hurt their channel strategies because partners began to compete against themselves, actually pitting SalesLogix against their other CRM product, SageCRM in demos. Not only did I hear about this from others several times, but I actually saw it. It also kept their technology architectures a generation behind pretty much all the time. Not a good formula for success in a world where CRM was both rapidly maturing and then rapidly changing. As an example, when the world was moving to SaaS, they hung in there with client/server and threw up a sort-of on demand product that was clearly half-hearted. But something changed dramatically in the last two years or so with the emergence of innovators and visionaries like CRM General Manager Dave Van Toor. First, they made an really good architectural choice, that while different from the contemporary standard choice, a service oriented architecture, was still on the money for SMBs. That would be REST or what is now called WOA - Web Oriented Architecture. Their line of argument for that stinks - SOA is bad, use REST (see their otherwise very interesting Sage CRM 2010 Strategy doc) - but their choice is good. REST is the same architecture that its being used as you’re viewing this web page. Its simple and familiar and standardized - and perfect for the SMBs. For a good detailed definition of REST, see this one. But just a good architectural choice is not the only reason I have them in this list. They’ve also seen the CRM 2.0 world and embraced it at multiple levels. In SalesLogix 7.5, they’ve built in significant wizards for handling multiple tasks such as the import of leads to make life easy; they’ve got the means to create and use mashups, and an interesting timeline visualization that can be customized to view both internal data/events and external events, among many other improved and Web 2.0 features. They’ve developed an attractive mobile SalesLogix for the Blackberry application that uses location in an interesting way, with “who’s nearby” feature that allows you to find out which clients are in the same vicinity as you, in case you want to go visit them, I presume. I’m not sure of the actual value of that particular feature, which, while cool, doesn’t really account for the fact that unplanned client visits of the “sure, drop by because you just called me up” nature, don’t often happen, but the application as a whole is very good. Additionally, when they released the new versions of their CRM products earlier this year, they were able to offer something that is becoming increasingly important in the business world - anytime, anywhere connectedness - even if you’re disconnected. This is is easily the best part of their current CRM applications strategy. The customer gets a choice of on premise or on demand (their other CRM product, SageCRM, has a hosted version SageCRM.com) The experience can be hybrid (on premise mixed with on demand) and can be connected, disconnected or mobile. What distinguishes this particular part of the strategy is their idea of Context Aware Services - which lead to their anytime, anywhere workforce awareness which when you break it down is device awareness, user awareness, network awareness. Finally, in a move to clarify vision and strategy, they’ve shed the idea that ACT! is CRM. That is LONG overdue. Dave Van Toor announced on his blog that he is no longer going to have ACT! as part of his portfolio - “just” SalesLogix and SageCRM. Rightfully. This is what I mean. No longer a generation behind, this is going to make the formidable Sage, with a total (including its accounting packages) of 5.5 million customers and 15,000 employees and $2.3 billion in revenue - even more formidable in 2009 in the CRM market space they’ve carved out. Finally, Sage is talking ’bout my generation. Its about time.
Been There…Now Starting to Do That
- SugarCRM - I have to presume you know who SugarCRM is. But if you don’t, they are the most successful (by far) open source CRM platform. They have a lot going for them. They have a smart business model - one that engages a 30,000 plus developers community called the Sugar Network (which appropos of nothing, is also the name of a network of 16 entertainment and beauty properties for women) to develop on the core platform. They are open source but they are not free when it comes to licenses. There is a free basic edition, but if you want functionality and tools worth anything you will buy either their on premise or on demand versions - which are competitively priced, though not exceptionally so. In the past, I thought they were overpriced and in fact, with “The Cube,” their standalone server solution - they were - though it seems to be a little better now. They have a savvy CEO in John Roberts, who while he isn’t the best rock singer in the world (kidding, just kidding….) is a great CEO and very smart business dude. They’ve made some really great hires, for example, Martin Schneider, a former analyst for the 451 Group and a brilliant one at that, who ostensibly handles analyst relations for them but does so much more (and is a damn good rock guitar player). They have a rather fluid corporate culture that really lives the “open source” way and doesn’t hassle too much about things yet is still accountable for success in business. With their recent release of the SugarCRM 5.2 platform, they overcame their glaring lack of social features by adding a small set of social feeds and what they call Portal Dashlets, which is basically a treacly name for enterprise mashup widgets - something being offered by SAP, Microsoft and many other vendors too. What’s most interesting is that they are offering “cloud connectors” which are hooks to any feeds of a LinkedIn, Jigsaw or Hoovers nature - in other external data sources to provide what would be a richer look at competitive intelligence. These are the technical links, not the actual feeds to any one of them. Finally, they’ve added Sugar Feeds which is a Twitter like (really more Yammer-like or SAP ESME-ish) way of interacting inside SugarCRM applications - and provides status, alerts, and notifications. All in all, a good start, though, of course, a long way to go. These make SugarCRM a company to be watching with a more intense look in 2009 than you might have in 2008. Where I still have some concerns with SugarCRM are that they are competing now as much as a platform as they are a CRM application suite and which one is the focus they want to give is not entirely clear. Their market message gets mixed sometimes, though they seem to lean to flexible CRM suite. I think. Also they have a partner program, that while miles better than it was a year ago, is still not competitive with their competitors. They have a ways to go and they will have to expend a considerable effort in building that, now that they will be oh-so-much-more-appealing due to the economic downturn. Otherwise, I can’t complain. Open source gets really interesting in economic downturns but I have to put a caveat here - its really interesting as a possible option, but it not only isn’t free, its not that cheap either. Just reasonable. SugarCRM’s competition? Maybe VTiger and Concursive….there are several others but I don’t see them as all that competitive - at least not as of yet. VTiger comes to you from Zoho/Adventnet so they have some market smarts and reach. But no one outreaches SugarCRM in open source. This is a company that has made huge strides in the last two years and gone from me occasionally glancing at them during 2007 to, as 2009 begins, staring at them. Time to pay very, very serious attention.
- NetSuite - NetSuite has had a consistent strategy that is unlike any other of its ilk in the industry. Led by the charismatic and hip CEO Zach Nelson, and the uberbrilliant co-founder and CTO Evan Goldberg, NetSuite hasn’t attacked the market with social features or been focused around innovation as its core. Its basic hardcore strategy has been to improve functionality so that you can do enterprise related operational work anywhere in the world in an on demand environment. They have been particularly focused on the upper end of the midmarket and have succeeded there very well. They have developed their One World edition that handles globalization and localization in one fell swoop in a rather effective way with a single interface. They went public at at time they should and even though they are of course affected by the recession, they are still in a strong financial position. They’ve fallen in the business platform pot like all their competitors. Unlike their competitors, though, their platform, NS-BOS is narrowly focused around developing industry specific applications - not just anything. Their pragmatic strategy has been historically part of their CRM applications, NetSuite CRM+, since day one with a core focus that extends back to their early days as financial software company NetLedger. They build their CRM applications around order management at the center. They are aimed at the upper end of the midmarket and squarely at SAP. They’ve even recently announced a “BusinessbyNetSuite” program for SAP customers to capture those customers who are exposed by the SAP Business by Design glitch. SAP needs to be concerned about NetSuite in this market. NetSuite is pragmatic and sound in their approach, they’ve had steady growth over the years and they try to not overstep their planned strategic boundaries. They are solid as a rock when it comes to their functionality. Finally, this is a company that knows how to market and communicate with the analyst community and press exceptionally well. Zach is a terrific speaker and a marvelous spokesperson in general for NetSuite - and a very, very cool, good natured guy. Mei Li, their SVP of Corporate Communications is not only known throughout the industry but extraordinarily well liked throughout the industry - not easy when it comes to cynical analysts and press and keeps the press and analysts well informed. I like this company and have for a long, long time. Yet, this doesn’t exempt them from what I see as some things they they need to do to become the breakout company they could, and I think it will take them until 2010 to do it. They still have some known customer service issues, though, commendably, they are working to fix them, from everything I’ve seen and heard. Additionally, I’ve always considered their channel program far too lean. Even with the excellent win of HP as a strategic partner, I don’t see rapid enough improvement here. This is an area, especially since they have a strong industry-specific focus to their strategy, that is absolutely vital to their future and its something I’d be jumping on right away and spending (their) money on. That said, they have some interesting partners - like Apple, CastIron and of course, the aforementioned HP. Finally, I think that they are going to need to start adding 2.0 functionality and I know from the horse’s mouth, that this is going to be the case for 2009. I have only one real complaint with them on the marketing side which I’ve always had - and this might just be me. I wish that they would stop their competitor attacks and competitive “we just won customer x from vendor competitor y” press releases and emails. Personally, I couldn’t care less who they took from whom, since I’m just as sure that the same vendor who lost the customer to them has taken one from them too. Win on your merits, NetSuite, which are formidable. I really have high hopes for them, but the things they need to do will take some time. They are a solid choice already, and always will be, but to get to the next level, they’ve got a busy year plus worth of work to do. But they are worthy of watching right now.
- RightNow - This company is a company that’s there and yet…almost there and have been that way for several years. I think 2009 is their breakout year if certain initiatives they’ve undertaken fall into place and they make sure that they manage their positioning around these initiatives well. They have been long established as the go-to guys for on demand customer service for quite some time. In fact, two months ago, Gartner positioned them as leaders in the E-Services Magic Quadrant, rightfully so. Unlike many of their on demand brethren, with perhaps the exception of Aplicor, they’ve penetrated the public sector deeply, an incredibly smart move. They’ve spent a good deal of time trying to position themselves and direct and redirect strategy. Sometimes too much and with odd glitches. For example, they bought the highly functional SalesNet in 2006 for $9 million (see this Phil Wainewright ZDNET 2006 entry for some solid analysis of the deal) and then tried to call it something that “improved the customer experience.” Not one of their better moves. Yet, they’ve moved to keep a focus, one better directed on customer experience as a core requirement of customer service. More recently, they’ve wisely begun to integrate some social CRM thinking and a bit of the functionality into their offering. For example, they have a tight partnership with Lithium since 2006 - which gives them the capability to provide threaded discussions inside of company-produced forums and communities. No longer just operational, they are beginning to integrate some quasi-social functionality - especially with the August 08 release of their on demand service (Their November 08 release is more geared to large scale contact center improvements and consolidated services). They have a pro-active chat function that tracks customer activity and when a pre-determined threshold is reached, a chat window pops up for the customer’s use if they so choose - based on the conditions of the activity. Additionally, they have a co-browsing function that pretty much sounds like GotoMyPC for tech folks. They added a single sign on customer portal that is primarily built around creating highly personalized services offerings that can be sculpted by the user themselves. The access is classic single sign-on. All in all, quasi-social and a great start. But Its only a start. But with CEO Greg Gianforte, who knows how to operate lean and VERY smart in lean times at the helm, RightNow could be a strong established up and coming (odd juxtaposition there, eh wot?) leader this coming year but like NetSuite need another year to mount up.
- Zoho - I’ve been a long standing fan of Zoho and saw their potential back in 2006 when they were first coming on the market. Before I get into them a little, I need to myth bust. They are viewed constantly as this startup making good. In truth, they are part of Adventnet, a nothing-like-a-startup and there are 600 engineers devoted to Adventnet products. This is a highly skilled company with a smart contemporary culture and a transparent, honest and responsive CEO, Sridhar Vembu, who, while I have some disagreements with when it comes to his public pronouncements, is, all in all, a refreshing change in his willingness to be actually accessible beyond a press conference or formal call and genuinely transparent regardless of the heat it might generate. Zoho has always provided a widespread and nearly complete collaboration suite. Originally consumer-strength and mostly free of charge, at the end of 2007, they announced their first “Business Edition” applications. They are web-based, not on demand per se, though they have a subscription model. Germane to us in these here parts, they have a CRM application - in reality, a sales force automation application. I have to tell you, it is functionally pretty solid. Its weakness, as with most Zoho collaboration and operational tools also, is that they don’t integrate that well with each other or with any other applications. The lack of integration issue seems to have been an issue that I fanned the flames of - though actually that isn’t entirely true. It was actually re-ignited by a comment from a reader of my blog Phil Hodgin in the above linked blog entry of mine - though I agree with him wholeheartedly. In any case, their lack of integration is addressed by Sridhar in this Zoho blog entry if you want to read about it. Shortly after the not-very-controversial controversy, Zoho announced Zoho CloudSQL, a first step really. It is middleware for developers that allows the use of SQL to access Zoho data in the cloud and is compatible with MySQL and Oracle’s, IBM’s and Informix’ flavors of SQL. A start at least. They have a staggering array of applications - enough to take up several more “pages” of a blog entry like this. What is important is that they get the social customer’s thinking and are geared to a future of “social customer behavior. Their combination of collaboration tools and operational applications is broad enough and now functionally deep enough and organized enough (See Zoho Creator and Zoho Notebook), lack of thorough integration notwithstanding, to provide a genuinely useful set of apps that small and midsized businesses can understand. While they are an astonishing open company and an honest one, they are not the greatest marketers on the planet and that is painful because they are up against the best in the software world in some cases. Beyond Sridhar, they don’t have a lot of traction when it comes to thought leadership and they need to invest in doing that or they will lose some ground. That said, they’ve graduated from the new kid on the block to the young adult making their way in the world successfully early on. They are currently an SMB player, to be sure; not an enterprise threat, but I wouldn’t put that past them someday.
One last note for this:
You’re probably wondering why Google isn’t included in this list since they’re included in every other list, are tied deeply into salesforce.com and are out for world domination -attempting to take over the universe, in fact. The world isn’t enough. I think that Google Earth is just their view of their perceived fiefdom.
The reason you don’t see them here is that this is, just a gentle reminder, a CRM-related companies watch list and this is not an area that Google shines. Where it gets very murky is that Google does have a series of collaboration and social applications and cloud computing is a major focus for them so that by next year, given the way that CRM 2.0 is evolving into a social customer strategy, I very well might, not all that surprisingly, include Google. But it is there lack of operational applications - even the back end ERP type apps - that eliminates them from this watch list. Though that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t watch them. They are hard to not watch, now, aren’t they? Google Google and you get 2,712,000,000 (that’s billion) references. Google “Paul Greenberg”, CRM and you get 216,000 references.
I know where I stand.
Next up: Companies you probably don’t know but really should and a few I’ll look at in the mid part of the year but want to mention now (some hints: HA! No way! These are cool up and coming companies. You’ll have to wait.)
December 10th, 2008
CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Live and Let Die - Part 1
We’re heading into the forecasting homestretch now. You’ve seen what I’m thinking ’sup for 2009 with this post, this post, and this post. Now we move onto the final one or two or three (we’ll see how long I can go writing each one before I get tired or sick and tired). This round is the companies that I think you should be watching in 2009 - the ones that will make an impact. They might be the long established industry denizens like Oracle, SAP or salesforce.com, or NetSuite. They might be newcomers - none of whom I’m going to mention until I get to them because I’d take away what little surprise I can actually provide. But, if you have ANY interest in CRM whatever or you’re a technology wonk OR you’re an analyst of something other than my mental and emotional state, then check these fair citizens of CRM out. This won’t be a “wow, they’re just so great” list. Each of these companies is worth a subscription so to speak but they have their flaws. Oh, several of them are or have been paid clients of mine. Take my word here, that didn’t get them in there. Several other of my present and past paid clients aren’t in here. In fact, most of them aren’t.
Just a bunch of FYIs. I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries in the past few days about checking out so and so’s company for the Companies to Watch for List (upwards of 30 inquiries in the last 5 days actually). Just a note to y’all. Either I’ve had you on my radar for a YEAR before you make this list OR you’ve made an impact that is so strong that I’ve not only noticed it but made the inquiries and met the people and did the demo and independently of you knowing this, talked to your customers, etc. If you’re contacting me now - you’re out of luck for this list. However, I will be announcing a “Visit at the MidYear” list at the end of these postings, naming a few companies that interest me but are not on the watch list yet. So keep the cards, letters and emails coming. I’ll do my best to get back to you asap. But forgive me if there’s a few days lagtime in my response. I’m swamped. Really. I swear.
Industry Giants - The Obvious
- Oracle -One of my new years resolutions is not to start everything on Oracle with “I never would have thought I’d be saying this but Oracle….” and then saying something good about them. They’ve now been good for a long time and don’t really (at least when it comes to CRM) need the qualifer. But, then this is still 2008, so… if this were a year and a half ago, I wouldn’t have made Oracle one of my top “companies to watch for 2009″ because I had nothing but contempt for them, but I have to tell you, despite some remaining weaknesses, Oracle might turn into the company to beat in 2009 when it comes to CRM 2.0 or as they insist on calling it, Social CRM. They have the clearest vision in the industry, thanks to the leadership of Anthony Lye, an underestimated industry intellectual and have an extraordinary CRM team to back that vision up ( n.b. FYI, I’m not saying this about any other division of the company at this juncture. We are speaking strictly CRM here. I still have serious problems with Oracle’s overall culture, though there are some signs it’s changing.). Their crystalline vision is built around a mix of Enterprise 2.0/Social CRM. That means it’s driven by “the company’s response to the customer controlling the conversation” and the impact of consumer thinking as it penetrates the business environment. They have a road map that adheres to the vision. They understand the value of thought leadership, not just market share. Their Social CRM applications are well thought out and they’ve made some serious progress with them. As of now, they have 3 that are at least maturing, if not fully mature. Sales Prospector, a social sales analysis that takes internal and external factors into account to determine the probable success chances of a deal based on both past customer success and external events and information pulled in. This is their highest risk application, because it depends on actual results with specific numbers that can be easily seen for being accurate or not. Sales Library, my personal favorite, uses social tools and user generated content like comments and ratings to pick out the best guess presentations and documents that a sales person would need to take to a prospect or client to close a sale. They also have another slightly more amorphous application called Sales Campaign. In addition, they are making huge progress in conjunction with L’Oreal on a more consumer focused social CRM product. It would allow mobile sales and mobile “someone like me” rankings, ratings and reviews of products that a customer might have an interest in. This is an iPhone application, a mobile platform that Oracle has a surprising and strong commitment to and that they nearly stand alone in terms of depth. At this stage, their Blackberry commitment isn’t that much to speak of. Finally, the undeniable. Siebel is just simply a flagship product for CRM and always has been and with their acquisition of Siebel, the flagship becomes Oracle’s. The recently announced Siebel 8.1.1 takes Siebel a magnitude forward. If you want to read more about that, and Oracle Social CRM for Sales “gadgets, read here. Oracle is one of the three contenders for next year’s top spot - if a “top spot” exists - and might even be the favorite at this point. Their announced going forward efforts will be in the mobile and on demand realms, so we’ll see how they deliver on that in 2009. The weaknesses? They have two. Their customer service applications from the social side are nothing to speak of at this point, though they have a commitment to changing that. Its just a matter of time before we see customer service apps that are meaningful from them. In the interim, they have a relationship to Helpstream, another company to watch, that probably has the paradigm customer service 2.0 social CRM application (to throw all the cliches into one line), which is at least an interim until they get their own or whatever Oracle does there. Their biggest detriment is the bigger company’s sales driven culture. I’ve seen little evidence of a universal customer driven corporate culture there, though the CRM group’s singular culture is highly customer driven. If the company wins out - well…I’ll have to break my 2009 resolution. But there are signs that the CRM group, especially now that we are in a recession, will influence the company more than it will be influenced. I hope so, because the commitment, passion and production of Oracle’s CRM applications promises nothing but goodness in the year ahead.
- SAP - For very different reasons, this was another company that 1.5 years ago, I would never have included in a CRM leadership category despite their announced sales of CRM applications software. The application was kludgy, an afterthought to SAP ERP R/3 iterations of one form or another and it was ugly as sin. But I always liked the company, despite some notable tightness in their approach to business and life. I had seen it make some significant changes in its culture over the years to its benefit. Though Shai Agassi left, his contemporary thinking was still alive in larger pockets of the company. SAP Labs was doing some incredibly cool, though not very public things, such as combining structured and unstructured search and building some eminently readable reports. They limited it, at the time, for internal use (now part of their product engines) and all in all, they had a shot to be sumpin’, sumpin’. But SAP CRM was just so….bad. But then, (crank up the music, turn on the lights, set off the fireworks, start cheering) along came SAP CRM 2007 with a new Google-like very clean and attractive interface, the ability to develop and use enterprise mashups as widgets, improved useful functionality. The strength of this interface was so apparent to SAP that they announced that it would be universally applied to all SAP products across the board. And, wowzer, there is the promise of changes that are considerably more substantial than just CRM products. As great as the transformation of the CRM product has been, the fast-moving cultural shift across significant parts of the company - though not all of it - is even more remarkable - and is not temporary. This cultural transformation is tipped off by a couple of things. First, SAP’s unique approach to thought leadership, which is unparalleled in the industry. Second, the penetration through at least some of SAP’s pores of a collaborative culture - one that other 21st century businesses can learn from. As far as thought leadership goes, SAP has invested in creating a “Business Influencers Group” that has some 60 employees or so that has the sole job of finding, reaching out to and engaging in some way, business influencers in the analyst community, academic world, etc. This group is astounding in scope and capability and I think unique in the world of enterprise applications - perhaps IT in general. It is ably run by VP Don Bulmer. To add to this, they have a VP, Mike Prosceno, devoted to reaching into the blogging community for similar purposes. SAP’s commitment to mind share, not just market share, is genuinely staggering and entirely commendable. One example of how intelligent their approach is - they have initiated a series of webinars and forums on business leadership for the recession - what to do. This is not a “Buy SAP” thing. This is a “listen to business leaders on how to approach this downturn” thing. This is being done through their external facilitated social site, MyVenturePad, run by Social Media Today’s amazing Robin Carey. The other indicator of culture change - beginning in and around their CRM and mobile apps groups - was the development of their the mobile SFA application for the Blackberry. Not only were they collaborating with business partners, in this case RIM, and customers to develop products, but were willing to cede some control to those business partners and customers in order for all the participants to benefit from the value creation. Would that others would emulate this…sigh. The result was one very strong mobile CRM product (soon to be released). This is the best CRM application I’ve seen for the Blackberry to date. They don’t just talk a good Web 2.0 game either. They live it. They have two communities, SDN for developers and BPX for business analysts (in the process sense). They use all the social media tools. Are there problems with these social sites. Sure. But the scale is mindblowing. BPX is 350,000 and that’s the smaller of the two. SDN has 1.3 million developers engaging in collaboration and discussion. Innovation has been on their agenda too with both an internal industrial-strength Twitter-like product called ESME (enterprise social messaging experiment) something that ZDNET enterprise app guru Dennis Howlett was very involved with - and with a customer service 2.0 application that combines SAP, Business Objects application Insight and Twitter to come up with a customer service Twitter chatter monitoring tool. It not only locates the Twitter complaint or discussion about a flagged product or issue but also qualifies its emotional level (from love to hate or 1 to 5, so to speak) that, depending on the seriousness of the problem, will trigger specific workflow to alert the appropriate customer service “authority.” These are huge leaps forward, which I presume, will be eclipsed in a good way by the upcoming SAP CRM 7.0 when it’s released in 2009. But there are several things that could stand in SAP’s way in 2009 too. Their CRM vision remains murky at best - murky enough that if I ask you what that vision is, you wouldn’t be able to tell me, would you? That needs to be fixed now. But that’s not my primary concern. What is most disturbing to me - and their greatest impediment - is their falling further and further behind with the Business By Design business - whether they are falling behind by design or not. When they announced what would amount to an 18 month lag to this SaaS based offering back at 2008 Sapphire, I thought that was a serious mistake. I still do, but the way they are dealing with that is almost worse. Now they are saying that they’re concerned that BBD would be too expensive to them - via the loss of on premise revenue and according to Prashanth Rai, reporting on the late November Leo Aptheker attended SAP NY Roundtable, are almost pooh-poohing the importance of SaaS . Thing is they need to release it as soon as possible because in a recession,