Today is the first day of the First Test Match between India-England. The players observe a minute's silence before the start of the game.

A very honest essay on the experiences with moving to cloud computing is available at the location :-  http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2008/12/10/3848401.htm

Some excerpts are as follows ...

 

Cloud computing to the max

(InfoWorld Daily Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Cloud services claim to provide nearly everything you need without requiring you to run your own IT infrastructure. From e-mail and Web hosting to fully managed applications to vast on-demand computing resources, the cloud is shaping up to be one of the most important technology shifts in the last few years.
.....

That said, not everything is easy, nor is the cloud right for everything. Certain technical requirements, such as very high performance with low latency, are challenging if not impossible. But there are a great many things that can be achieved at a lower cost and minimal risk.
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Why I entrusted my own business to the cloud
I recently worked for an open source software company that had employees all over the world. That made us extremely dependent on technology to manage interpersonal relationships, all business functions, communications, and software development mechanics.
.......
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Development services in the cloud
To keep development smooth and not have to spend a ton of money on hardware, we moved all our development applications to Contegix, a managed hosting provider that supported the range of commercial and custom products we used. Our team also had access to the boxes so that every change didn't have to go through a trouble-ticket process (unless we wanted it to).
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E-mail. We made the decision from day one that we never wanted to run our own mail server. E-mail is critical to most businesses these days, and it was critical in our case because we had a worldwide development and support team, continuous integration and build servers, forums, blogs, and so on. With all that to handle, we simply didn't want to deal with the possibility of e-mail going down. Letting someone else handle our e-mail sounded great. And it was great -- except when it wasn't.
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As it turned out, plenty could go wrong. This was before Gmail supported IMAP, and the POP implementation turned out to have a few very bizarre quirks, such as the fact that you couldn't POP down e-mail that you sent to yourself, including CCs. Messages would disappear into the ether. And user management was a total nightmare; we had something like 40 aliases for lists that had to be entered individually.

.......

Yes, the cloud requires you to give up some control to get benefits. But as far as I can tell, the positives far outweigh the negatives.

Copyright ? 2008 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

Shankar

There is a wonderful post on Emergent Idea Ecologies by Jay Vanzyl. I have listed it below in the trackback.

 

Starbucks uses this: “We know you’ve got ideas - big ideas, little ideas, maybe even totally revolutionary ideas - and we want to hear them all.”

BMW’s Virtual Innovation Agency uses a context setting mechanism to attract ideas. “If you have innovative solutions for our complex challenges, then you are on the right road with us.”

Dell uses IdeaStorm to elicit ideas from the public. “Where your ideas reign.”

SalesForce.com has Idea Exchange and uses it to obtain ideas and allow customers to interact with other customers’ ideas.

Cisco has their Human Network initiative; “When technology meets humanity on the human network, the way we work changes. The way we live changes. Everything changes.” For me this is the move towards the Human Mash-up.

Coca Cola has a number of concepts to elicit ideas from the public by allowing people to design their own bottles and other seasonal events by using on-line tooling. Check the Bottle Mash-up concept.

Lego has “Creator” where members of the public can ask questions, design their own units and upload digital design ideas. It is a window into the design world of Lego.

3M’s “YourIdea” is one approach used to obtain ideas from the public. Command products has its own idea capturing environment.

Apple also has a number of approaches, but the Learning Interchange stands out as a great community based initiative. Ideas collected during teaching (well before and after is also needed) can result in great new products, business ideas and a number of other positive side effects.

Idea based Wiki’s are also emerging. IdeasGrande is a project to get creatives and practitioners from the advertising and marketing industry to share ideas through an unstructured wiki.

These are really some of the best out there. Wonderfully useful.  The best part would be if someone is able to relate these to a CRM in the backend. I am sure they would have already done that but it is a matter of time before we see some real good ones coming up to join the party.  This makes the Action-Reaction-Action process all the more dynamic and interactive.

The traditional idea mgmt systems have had some good things and some bad things as mentioned below.

 Some key issues with traditional Idea Management Systems:

1. It becomes an administration nightmare. The more enthusiastic the organization the bigger the problem. Hundreds of ideas and only a few people to check, review, approve and re-direct ideas.

2. Volumes of ideas that have nothing to do with the business or its current challenges.

3. Dependence on specifically skilled people and a review process that is overly controlling.

4. Little- or no- follow-through on ideas to the individuals that participated in capturing ideas; resulting in damaging any further idea generation campaigns.

In this web2.0 age, these idea management tools will lead us to a more inclusive C in the Customer Relationship Management space. Any company which has a good set of these tools will harvest the most out of the 'chatter' and positions itself strategically for the future.

What is your take on this?

Shankar

The downturn has further emboldened the pro-SaaS side of the argument. There are distinct signs of the pro-SaaS argument being further embellished.
DestinationCRM carried an article as mentioned in the trackback stating the same.

 A new Gartner survey indicates that nearly 90 percent of current or intended users of on-demand software expect to maintain or grow their SaaS footprint.

 Nearly nine out of 10 organizations expect to maintain or grow their usage of SaaS products, citing cost-effectiveness and ease/speed of deployment as primary reasons for adoption, according to a recent Gartner survey of 258 firms either currently using SaaS, or planning to use it within the next 12 months.

The key drivers behind the use of SaaS, according to survey respondents, included:

• total cost of ownership,
• unmet performance expectations with on-premises solutions, and
• changes in sourcing strategy.

The entire value proposition is to get the job done at the lowest cost with maximum efficiency. SaaS defines this.

Shankar

There is an excellent article on this by Jeremy Quittner. I have pasted the url in the trackback link.


In a startup when things go good, the initial growth phase is fast, in fact, rapid. Though revenue incoming is slow, more staff are added, more-than-needed-top-level-executives-added, sales figures are floated, something-like-marketing done, customers grow from y to
y x y , no time to stop and take stock and ........

One fine day, realization dawns that there is no control left and it is just about Just In Time handling of scenarios. And then, a seemingly small screwup happens, and then you realise that it is not a small screwup but the starting of an avalanche!

Now what????

Cost-cutting starts. Heads roll. Pink slips are the call of the day. Pick any guy who did not say hello to the dog ;-) and fire him. At all costs, cut the flab! All because of a lack of structure to maintain the progress.

Here SaaS services help. They quantify and qualify the effort done and justify the expenses too. There is no shoving data under the carpet and no lofty talks. All that matters is the data. Rest all are fluff as they should be.

Robert Mahowald, director of SaaS and on-demand research at Framingham (Mass.) researchers IDC, says hosted software can bring cost savings of 25% to 60% if maintenance and IT staff are factored in.

 

Depending on what the need is, one can use an online CRM system, an online Accounting system, an online need-solving-system,..... and pay for it on a pay-as-you-use basis. No overhead costs!!! This makes life a lot lot simpler.

SaaS is not the answer to ALL the problems. There will always be certain things that are required to be onsite. But look at the cost-savings factor and the less-hassles factor. You save time in hosting, bug-fixing, server updates, etc. All these further lower your expenses and you can pass on these benefits to the end user.



There is another interesting manner of differentiating the SaaS vs the non-SaaS impact as mentioned at
http://wekti.com/2008/12/04/saas-and-the-shift-from-it-capex-to-it-opex/.

Think about it.

Shankar

I guess, the question should be how much sociable should CRM be?
The social networking aspect is something that we understand as humans but not so clear in engg terms. We empathise, we feel but what all do we mine from the data that is publicly/privately available in these social networks? This is an area that has lots of privacy issues at stake. What is private becomes a 'point of view' question.

Mark Courtney has a nice post which addresses this issue to some extent. I have added it to the trackback for this post.

"... a fertile hunting ground for potential customers" is what Mark says and I agree with him.
The problem is what amount of data should be considered 'safe' to take?
Also will the user feel his privacy is violated?
Imagine you getting a phone call and the caller has almost all your info with him! (which you had posted sometime, somewhere). Won't it feel eerie???!

The nuance is lost here as to how the data is present. If there is info but well presented, then there is a chance of a sale else there is chance of .... ahem, bad things happening.
This cuts both ways hence needs a lot of careful handling.

 The latest version of Oracle’s Siebel CRM suite, Siebel 8.1.1 and CRM Gadgets for Sales, includes a My Contacts Gadget, for example. This is essentially an applet that allows companies using Oracle’s CRM software to mine details that subscribers have posted on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

 The idea, according to Oracle executives, is to use consumer social networks as replacements for email.

I think that is a lot of marketing bs. That will not happen anytime soon and I doubt if it will ever happen. The privacy aspect will eventually be the messages/mail. Even spies use it for God's sake!

 Likewise, Salesforce.com says that its Force.com platform, which features an applet called Faceforce.com that links Salesforce.com’s CRM tool with Facebook – ­ is not about sales lead generation, but having a “deeper customer relationship” based on communities.

This makes sense. All CRM systems will try and start tinkering in this hazy area and try to figure out if they make their sales/marketing life easier! This is a sticky wicket mind you.

The more I look at it, the more I feel the intent is to get the Customer into the Product Development. Earlier too we had tools but no so dynamic, not so in-the-face, not so ease-of-use, conversational. Now it would seem to be a sudden enlightenment which has dawned on all (esp the CRM vendors) to go after this.

OpenID is making the integration a lot more simpler. We are slowly moving towards a dis-organizedly organized world. CRM has to play within this

 Slater believes that the whole ethos of marketing has altered in parallel with the advance of Web 2.0 technology, and organisations need to adapt their sales methods accordingly. “Vendors have to be aware of the conversations that customers have with each other,” he says. “There has been 20 years of indoctrination in marketing that says you control the brand, and you put the message out. But the world has changed.”

Slater hit the nail on the head. He has got it spot-on!

 

Richard Boardman, managing director and founder of independent CRM consultancy Mareeba, believes the benefits of integrating CRM and social networks from the customer perspective are negligible. He suspects the recent Oracle and Salesforce.com moves are just an attempt to generate publicity by jumping on the social networking bandwagon.

“Both companies are talking about a raft of integration with social networking sites, but I don’t really follow what they are trying to achieve,” he says. “Social networking sites are the antithesis of corporations, very difficult to control and built by people themselves to host their own content.”

That is a very interesting view point. What do you have to say about it?



Shankar

http://www.itp.net/news/539910-gartner-says-companies-need-to-put-more-strategic-emphasis-on-crm

Spending on CRM also tends to focus on specific areas, with 70-80% of CRM spending going to campaign management, sales force automation (SFA), and contact centre and call centre operations.

 

These are the most used features. We are working on enhancing Zoho CRM to cater to these. The experience while using these features too is being addressed. So keep your fingers crossed. You may just about see them happening shortly.

 The main issues for companies looking to get the most from CRM investment going forward will be to ensure integration of different silos of CRM, between operational, analytic and collaborative applications, to address systems as one strategic whole, according to Dunne.

One can actually try and combine their zohocrm data with zoho db and get the strategic reports out. We are working on getting the SSO done which will make life a lot easier.
Right now, one will have to export out of zoho crm and import into zoho db to get their reports.

I use zoho db and it is amazing. I think it will be a great integration to have once it is ready.

 Businesses can also use CRM to provide a competitive edge in a declining economy, in three key areas: price execution and deal management to help manage sales negotiations; price analytics to optimize pricing and charge more where possible, and relationship management and account management to identify the most lucrative customers.

This is very important. The last point was a no-brainer. If it is not done, one may as well close shop right now! One can do these analytics using zoho db too.
It will be interesting to see how people customize their CRMs to handle the first 2 points. Generally only the  "deal management to help manage sales negotiations" part is done in CRM.

 Gartner warned that it expects to see consolidation among CRM vendors over the next twelve months, with as many as thirty vendors expected to cease trading in 2009, and urged companies to consider vendor viability before entering into any new projects. The CRM market will continue to expand however, with more competition between the cheaper CRM offerings, and ongoing development of niche CRM for certain verticals, or specialized functions.

This is the real impact. So do consider the viability of the service provider. He may just about disappear like the dinosaurs only that you will know WHY they did disappear this time!

Zoho is building a wide variety of services to ensure that one is able to provide end-to-end support for all enterprise needs. We are here for the long run. So you can safely consider Zoho for any enterprise needs.

Shankar

Inside CRM has a good blog about it here @ http://www.insidecrm.com/features/sales2-improve-business-112508/

  “Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.”

Basically, it is about marrying customer needs and efficient technology with a single purpose of generating more sales. This address the C in the CRM acronym.

I am not sure as to the amount of motivation it provides the sales force but it certainly helps to have tools which provide a real-time, collaborative approach to sales. It helps to keep the tail up and have some idea of how the possible sale is going. Who else to sell best than someone you know! There comes the importance of the collaboration part.
You start selling to someone known. You start buying from someone known. The x factor is not present anymore.

5 Basic Tenets of Sales 2.0

 1. Sales 2.0 is about acceleration.
2. Sales 2.0 is about collaboration.
3. Sales 2.0 is about professionalization.
4. Sales 2.0 is about accountability.
5. Sales 2.0 is about alignment.

The acceleration because all happens at net-speed ie most of the sales 2.0 techniques are net-based and hence real-time. No long telephone calls etc.

The collaboration because even within an organization, the sales and marketing co-operate among themselves using the net. This helps them get instant access to the latest stats they have on the competition. Moreover, the customer can be shown the product/service live on the net. This takes away the x factor again.

Sales2.0 provides tools to enforce discipline. Due to this discipline, the data is added on time and as a result, one can generate latest graphs and trends. These help in keeping the customer profile updated everytime.

With increased collaboration comes increased transparency. This makes people more accountable. This helps in directing allocation of budgets, checking efficacy of the campaigns or the stars in the company. This promotes accountability and thereby efficiency.

With marketing and sales working together, there is an alignment of goals. Typically, sales and marketing remain in their own silos. Sales 2.0 breaks these silos and makes them work as a cohesive unit.

End of the day, Sales 2.0 makes an organization work like a family - each working toward the others benefit in order to reach a bigger goal of success and happiness.

Shankar

Salesforce did something similar to Siebel long before, remember?

Have a happy Dreamforce guys. Hope you see our truck. Do post your views here.

Shankar