CRM products are notoriously difficult to differentiate in terms of functionality – so ACN’s here to help with a look at the latest offerings from vendors, including the burgeoning business intelligence sector.
Salesforce.com
By now, everyone’s heard of Marc Benioff’s on-demand sensation Salesforce.com. It’s the one to beat, leading the market for on-demand CRM applications – and Middle East CIOs would be highly amiss if they ignored the potential lurking under the hype.
The key behind Salesforce’s remarkable growth is its ease of deployment. While other more traditional – and server-bound – CRMs require careful study of an organisation’s existing IT infrastructure and can take months – if not years – to set up, Salesforce’s web-based system can deploy within weeks, with subsequent applications equally easy to rollout. The company also claims seamless upgrades, which must sound like music to overworked IT team’s ears.
Other Salesforce highlights include integration with Google Apps – allowing sales executives to remain productive regardless of what they use to connect – and customer portals which are intended to create user communities with a repository of resources to get the best out of the available applications.
However, while it’s easy to get caught up in the evangelical fervour of Salesforce.com, one mustn’t forget that its products are entirely dependent on connectivity.
Many regional enterprises also prefer the familiarity and security of having 100% ownership of their applications – mindsets which Salesforce.com, for its all benefits, will take time to alter.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft has had to watch for a number of years now as beasts like Oracle and SAP have cornered the lion’s share of the CRM market, while its own Dynamics product has been labelled only worthy of SMBs.
With the release of version 4.0, the software giant is hoping to get back into the enterprise game, so it’s rolling out the big gun – Microsoft Excel.
All right, so Excel isn’t new at all, but a lot of companies do still use it to store their customer data, so it makes sense for Microsoft to strengthen the link between the data.
Dynamics now sports a dynamic data connection with Excel sheets so users can combine the latter’s analysis tools with live CRM data.
The other big selling point for Dynamics is the same one the Redmond firm uses to sell everything it creates – familiarity.
Even though it’s a hideously complex CRM application, visually it resembles familiar Office applications like Outlook so it won’t intimidate salespeople – who aren’t exactly known for their IT savvy.
Microsoft touts a laundry list of other improvements – mostly borrowed from the new version of Office – such as AutoComplete, better mail merge capabilities, the ability to customise the Navigation Pane to user tastes and multi-tenancy, which allows multiple sales groups to share the same hardware while maintaining segregated data.
While Microsoft Dynamics CRM may still have some way to go to challenge the CRM leaders, the company’s trump card may have just been played with the April release of a new on-demand version, which broadly compares to Salesforce.com in functionality.
Microsoft may yet be able to pull off an end-run around the big players – watch this space.
Oracle
It would be enormously difficult for any CRM feature to avoid Oracle – but it’s also enormously difficult for potential end users to make sense of Oracle’s vast and bewildering array of products.
For instance, just in the CRM space Oracle offers three distinct packages: Siebel (an acquisition from 2005 focusing on customer service applications), Oracle CRM (part of E-Business suite) and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne CRM (which is what became of PeopleSoft, also purchased in 2005).
In case one is not yet thoroughly confused, there’s also another tier of products that deal with something called ‘Social CRM’, and the now-obligatory on-demand version (which is up to release 15 as of this month).
Unfortunately, if Oracle’s website is any guide, it’s nigh-on impossible to work out what the differences are between these various products.There is a complete lack of information on, for example, why EnterpriseOne is better suited to higher education than Siebel – by the way, the answer for that one is because PeopleSoft has extensive experience with colleges throughout the US, while Siebel works better for contact centres and mobile workers.
Of course, Oracle’s idea behind having this many products in the same category is that the customer can cherry pick the best product for his or her organisation.
However, the end result is that the customer is just likely to end up confused – ironically, putting more pressure on Oracle’s sales people to more clearly express its message.
SAP CRM
Of all the vendors to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, the hidebound traditionalists from SAP seem the least likely. But that’s just what the German vendor has done with the December 2007 release of its CRM product, which sees SAP enter the dangerously alluring world of Web 2.0.
Like its peers, SAP touts the aforementioned Web 2.0 aspects of its new interface as the next big thing for CRM.
The idea is that new sales and marketing employees, familiar with consumer-facing Web 2.0 products like Facebook and Wikipedia, can make better user of SAP’s extensive CRM feature set if it’s laid out in a similar way – rather than be faced with extensive training before using the system.
Another useful feature of the latest edition of SAP CRM is business communications management, which provides “an all-IP software-based contact centre solution, eliminating the need for costly communications hardware” – which is actually a very good idea, bringing unified communications right to the sales and marketing people who need it most.
With other new features including real time offer management, service parts management and the ability to centrally manage market development funds, SAP CRM cements its position as a strong offering, which should continue to see market success.
Kudos to SAP’s web team as well – of the all products listed in this article feature, only SAP matched web specialists Salesforce.com in going the extra mile to explain functionality in clear language free of marketing-ese, while a number of customer case studies are readily on-hand to explain how CRM works in the real world.
Cognos Business Intelligence 8
Cognos first released version 8 of its business intelligence product back in 2005 – which certainly makes it due for an update. The IBM-acquired BI vendor obliged in January this year when it put out a point release of its flagship – and well, only – product, taking it up to version 8.3.
However, don’t expect any dramatic changes to Cognos’ already-solid platform – this release is more about gradual refinement than revolution. To that end, new features for end users include Express Authoring for easier report creation and scorecard ‘portlets’ allowing users to access a wide range of data without creating a full report.
There’s also improved Transformer capabilities – which is sadly not what one might expect – but instead enhancements to Cognos’s data cube publishing abilities.
Administrators are likely to see the greatest benefits from version 8.3’s improved Dashboard interfaces which allow an enhanced overview of an entire enterprise’s BI use – crucial in an era which is seeing BI move out individual departments.
Cognos’s bigger competitor, however, is likely to be its earlier version – which was so feature complete that many enterprises will find it hard to justify an update.
TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO is a relatively new entrant to the BI space, having acquired Massachusetts-based specialist Spotfire in May last year.
However, the BPM specialist hasn’t sat idle with its new purchase, releasing a new version 2.1 of TIBCO Spotfire 2.1 in April this year. Unfortunately, the company has made a highly dubious foray in ‘street’ culture with the new Spotfire, claming that 2.1 will “help customers and partners more easily create highly visual, interactive, and extremely fast business mashups adapted to their needs.
Spotfire 2.1 brings the interactive, visual nature of innovative Web 2.0 applications to enterprise users, allowing subject matter experts to leverage standard interfaces and BI data to create user experiences.”
Oh dear. TIBCO should really be barred from referring to anything – ever – as a ‘mashup’, especially something as potentially uninteresting as BI, especially when all this really means is that someone at the firm has discovered the wonderful world of Web 2.0.
Having said this, TIBCO’s basic idea – replacing plain spreadsheets and static reports with dynamic web data from both inside and outside the enterprise – is a commendable one.
By streamlining the report creation process into a more web-friendly one, the firm is aiming to make the complicated process analytics easier to use for everyone in the organisation. The new Spotfire should see great success – just don’t hold its marketing against it.
The connectivity conundrum
Software-as-a-service (SAAS) currently has the hottest buzz in the marketplace – but vendors would do well to remind interested end users that the system is heavily reliant on available connectivity – which as this year’s cable cuts demonstrated, is not always at optimum levels.
Gartner analyst Chris Pang explains why SAAS uptake rates may not match Western enterprises: “In the Middle East, we expect the uptake to be a little bit slower and follow the trend of continental Europe, places like France and Germany as opposed to the UK and Netherlands which have been faster adopters of SAAS.”
“One of the reasons for this is the local infrastructure. In a place like Dubai, for example, that’s not going to be a problem, there’s good connectivity there. But in other parts of MEA, where broadband isn’t quite so ubiquitous, there’s going to be some major performance issues if you’re trying to use SAAS applications,” he says.
PeopleSoft all the way
A CRM system is essentially a database – so to be effective, it has to present its information in as straightforward a manner as possible.
Sales and marketing people aren’t always good with IT – and neither are college students, it seems, as PeopleSoft found last year in a university-based CRM implementation that went very badly south.
As the University of Calgary’s student-run campus paper Gauntlet reports, the school was desperate to replace its Infonet student registration that dated back to the mid-1970s and turned to PeopleSoft.
The system went live in February – and triggered a firestorm of criticism from students and faculty who described it as “frustrating”, “confusing”, “the devil”, “a total nightmare,” and “PeopleHard.”
Office administrator of biological sciences David Bininda called the system cumbersome: “It’s awkward, inefficient and not well thought out with a long learning curve. It’s workable, but just not a very pleasant experience.”
Second-year geography and history student Rica Hanson was equally uncomplimentary about the CRM’s built-in help system and database: “The help menu is basically a joke. It does very little to help you learn to navigate through PeopleSoft.”
Unsurprisingly, the system’s few supporters came from the IT department and faculty. Fourth-year computer science major Juan Rivera explained that the underlying system was sound: “The problem lies in the interface that is presented to students. It’s like a poorly designed web application that you need to be familiar with to fully understand it.”
Clearly, there’s a lesson here for many CRM vendors: don’t neglect the user interface in favouring adding new functionality – and don’t forget the linguistic challenges of working in the Middle East.
Only time will tell if the region’s big CRM players will avoid the relentless jibes that defined this PeopleSoft implementation.
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