crm watch list 2010
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CRM Watchlist 2010To engage that new breed of customer - the social customer -vendors of enterprise and small business software aretransforming the way they build and deliver their goods.Here are the companies worth your attention.
February 2010
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CRM Watchlist 2010
B Pal Greenberg
Every now and then, something truly revolutionary
impacts the business world. In the last 7 or 8 years,
we experienced a transformation in the way that wecommunicate.
There were business ramications of this revolution,
although business by no means led the revolution.
Business faced a new kind of customer a social
customer. This new breed of customer set a much
higher bar for business. The social customer expected
businesses to recognize that customer trust had shifted
from those businesses to peers, and the tools to
communicate with those peers made it inexpensive, simple
and fast to communicate their opinions about those same
businesses to their peers. And their peers listened.
Companies in the vendor world of enterprise software,
particularly CRM, realized that the way they constructed
and delivered their software had to change to meet the
business requirements for engaging these transformed
customers. This wasnt an easy transition because
most of the traditional CRM software was operational
and transaction-based. The new software called for
customer engagement and capturing the interactions
of those customers in addition to the operational and
transactional. Companies also realized that the software
needed to provide features and tools that would allow
this social customer to sculpt their own experience of the
companies with whom they chose to interact.
These watchlists look at the vendors in the enterprise
software and social software worlds that are making that
attempt the attempt to evolve the kinds of software that
both satisfy business internal requirements and extend
the channels to intersect with customers. Some of these
vendors are doing great at it, some not so great. After
all, these are watchlists, not love letters. But all of these
companies are worth your attention.
Take a look, and let me know what you think. 2010 is a
big year for all business. Some of these companies may
even be able to help you.
Part I: Te Big 4
Selection for Part I was simple: The universally recognized
Four Big Bad Boys of CRM are, in no particular order,
Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and salesforce.com.
SAP
2010 is going to be an interesting
year for SAP. As I noted in my SAP
Business Inuencers Conference analysis, if they are
going to begin to regain some of the market, especially in
the on demand and cloud worlds (which they claim a total
commitment to), they are going to have to clarify their
overall message. Regain might be the wrong word here -
gain is more appropriate. They not only must decide what
they are going to be to the market, but how they are going
to approach their own product/services portfolio. I have
some denite differences with the efcacy of the message
they seem to be presenting, which you can read in my
previous analysis.
But there is much more here than their message. Ive seen
a release of SAP CRM 7.0 and it is a clear improvement
over their rst real CRM market killer product -- which was
SAP CRM 2007. SAP CRM 7.0 is a very, very good app
with a couple of aws, most notably what I think was (atleast when I saw it) badly executed territory management
functionality. However, the overall CRM 7.0 app is not
only strong in traditional sales and customer service func-
tionality (I didnt see the marketing pieces) but also has
integrated social channels such as Twitter and Facebook
and allows for other channels through customization that
is not hard to do. They also have, gasp of all gasps, a very
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attractive, user friendly, even-better-than-the-Google-
white-interface-of-SAP-CRM-2007, interface that allows
for personalization of the workspace through individualized
widget selection and through arrangement of what you
want to see and view including feeds and dashboards, or,
say, current opportunities that need to be acted on.
But, this is about the company in 2010, not the product.
Were going to be reviewing the product among many
others in 2010.
Okay, onward and upward.
One area that I (and others) think has served SAP very
well and will continue to be a market mover for them is
their acquisition of Business Objects. From a CRM stand-
point, there are several products of importance that comefrom Business Objects. First is their integration of Twitter
with Business Insight, which provides a strong sentiment
analysis/text analysis of meaningful Twitter streams and
attaches business rules and workow so that alerts and
routing at the enterprise level based on the Twitter senti-
ment can be done. Second is the use of Business Objects
Explorer, which theyve made the analytics engine as-
sociated with their in memory model computing. It does
lightning-fast, near-real or real-time calculations (we saw275 million data rows gured out in less than a second)
and an actually accomplished on demand product with
Business Objects Business Intelligence on Demand.
But for them to regain ground that I think they lost in the
CRM world in 2009, they need to gure out who they are
fast and make a far better case for their commitment to
the cloud and on demand than they have to date. While
not strictly a CRM-related effort, their release of Business
By Design this year will be critical to their reinvention.
Theyre already at version 2.5, which they call a feature
pack not a release. (I guess because it hasnt been
released. Duh.) It seems to be fully functional; yet pinning
them to an actual release date is a bit of a chore. They
have a theoretical 100 customers now, which places them
well behind the on-demand curve - at a distance they may
never catch up if they dont get down and dirty and take
a calculated shot at releasing this elusive product. If they
dont, they will suffer cross-enterprise, including CRM,
because of their publicly stated commitment to SaaS and
the cloud - at least as a hybrid (also Oracles strategy).
And, honestly, I dont know that they will release it, which,
at this point, puts them in the enough but too late and
Im still a skeptic category.
On the CRM side, to their credit, they are following some
of the trends they need to. They have a major commit-
ment to mobile. They have a REST API that smacks
of mobile technology love. They have an alliance with
Sybase and the Sybase iAnywhere platform, which gives
them the ability to translate content on the mobile y
regardless of operating system. They have a partnership
with Syclos that gives them a highly congurable eld ser-
vice mobile app that focuses on asset & service manage-
ment. They have their BlackBerry SFA app, which was
developed by RIM in breakthrough collaboration by SAP
and released in May 2009, about a year after the initial
announcement. In this domain, nothing could be clearer
regarding their commitment - and its CRM impact.
2010 for SAP -- at least when it comes to CRM -- is a
watershed year. They have three things theyre going to
have to do to jump forward. First, the company has to
clarify who they are and commit to that vision and mission.
Second, they need a MUCH better marketing and mes-
saging effort around CRM 7.0 despite their apocryphal
someday three letter acronyms will disappear thrust
taken at the SAP Business Inuencers Summit. (Yeah,
thatll happen soon.) This part of their work has been
muddied at best, poorly managed at worst. But CRM 7.0
needs to have top-of-the-class visibility, since it could be
a agship for SAP. Third, they need to release Business
By Design, even without a CRM component, so that
their commitment to SaaS at least is seen as something
serious, because it isnt easy to see at this point. For our
purposes, a CRM 7.0 campaign and release is something
that makes or breaks their position in the CRM industry
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and with customers, in 2010. Its a big year for these guys.
They lost ground in 2009 and need to make it up in 2010.
ORACLE
The last year has
been game changing for Oracle when it comes to Social
CRM. While they initiated their effort in 2008, what they
called Social CRM then was really more Enterprise 2.0
and sales optimization functionality with their announce-
ment of Sales Prospector, Sales Library and Sales Cam-
paign. The only thing they did that approximated actual
Social CRM - meaning it provided a pipe for customer
engagement - was the mobile loyalty stuff they did with
LOreal, which allowed customers to provide and get
user-generated content via comments, ratings, rankings
etc on the consumer Internet. But in 2009, their road map
and releases were spot on when it comes to the pulse of
the public and business -- and were more along what we
expect Social CRM technology to be. During OpenWorld
2009, they announced a number of key applications,
including one from left eld that I personally would never
have seen coming. They announced a toolkit that worked
with Siebel customer data (transactional, one must pre-
sume) that seemed to be one of the rst realized applica-
tions using social characteristics - in this case Connect
to someone like me access for customers using Siebel
data. They arent the only company using transactional
data to gure out and score who is like me. (SAS in
their Customer Intelligence analytics is entirely capable
of doing that.) But the fact that they are taking the social
customers seriously throughout their entire CRM organi-
zation is actually refreshing.
What makes Oracle a no longer so surprising contender
for leadership in the Social CRM realm is that their CRM
organization is committed to innovation -- and is commit-
ted to it from thought leadership (mindshare) to product
development and marketing (market share). Is that a
company-wide trait? Not to my knowledge; but their CRM
team sure gets it.
Then the cherry? CRM is Oracles most successful
revenue producer in 2009. Not too shabby.
What are the pitfalls? Well, there are a couple that can make
Oracle someone less than like me. First, they have to
actually release all these things they are showing and not do
what the big boys often do, which is endless beta cycles.
Put it on an accelerator program if need be and get it out,
and iterate, iterate, iterate with the customers. Let the cus-
tomers point out the production aws. This is an area where
SAP does very well and Oracle not as well. I get what their
corporate imperatives are, and I understand we dont live in
a pure world. But there does come a time when the custom-
ers need to know youre real, and the social customer is that
much more demanding than they were ve or six years ago.
Releasing these products and not just endless roadmaps
would go a long way to slaking that social customer thirst.
Second, align the cloud messaging coming from Larry El-
lison with what the benets of the cloud to Oracle actually
are. His mockery, while ha-ha funny, as you can see from
the Churchill Club video, isnt appropriate if Oracle wants
to be successful in 2010. Like every company with deep
on-premise commitments, no one is going to fault Oracle
for a hybrid model. SAP has one too. Microsoft sort of
has one. As Ray Wang, one of the most respected and
well liked analysts in the enterprise world, recently said
on a video interview with Robert Scoble and his Altimeter
Group partner, Jeremiah Owyang, on premise informa-
tion, thats not going to go away. But all the edges, best of
breed solutions...what you can do to move infrastructure
costs, thats moving into the cloud. But Ellison needs to
realize that, regardless of his pronouncements, not only
is the cloud here to stay but it is of increasing interest to
many of his major customers. Im not speaking of the
CRM group here. They are down with that already.
In 2010, then, they have to deliver their roadmap and kick
up their efforts in the cloud to maintain a leading position
in CRM.
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http://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-sales-campaigns-data-sheet.pdfhttp://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-sales-campaigns-data-sheet.pdfhttp://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2008/10/oracle-openworld-2008-applicat-1.htmlhttp://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2008/10/oracle-openworld-2008-applicat-1.htmlhttp://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/?p=1088http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14ohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14ohttp://www.building43.com/videos/2009/12/22/2010-trends-promisemore-speed-and-integration/http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/12/22/2010-trends-promisemore-speed-and-integration/http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/12/22/2010-trends-promisemore-speed-and-integration/http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/12/22/2010-trends-promisemore-speed-and-integration/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14ohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14ohttp://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/?p=1088http://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2008/10/oracle-openworld-2008-applicat-1.htmlhttp://blogs.oracle.com/usableapps/2008/10/oracle-openworld-2008-applicat-1.htmlhttp://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-sales-campaigns-data-sheet.pdfhttp://www.oracle.com/applications/oracle-sales-campaigns-data-sheet.pdf -
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SALESfORCE.COm
What can you say about
these guys? Theyve
understood from the get
go that consumer thinking
actually has been driv-
ing business for years. In
fact, as far back as 2002, Tien Tzuo (now Zuora CEO and
then CSO of salesforce.com) told me that. Their current
product iterations - their so-called 4 clouds -- Service
Cloud 2,Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter --
are indicators of that very approach, as is Marc Benioffs
announcement of that very premise on the stage of
Dreamforce 2009.
If you look at the social vendors -- the Radian6s of the
world, Jive, InsideView, etc. -- the rst CRM-related
company they integrate with -- their test runs so to speak
-- are all with salesforce.com. These arent insane deci-
sions. They are calculated for many reasons; the compat-
ible technical architecture is of course part of it, though
not all of it. Remember, Apex is a proprietary language.
But its also the compatible culture, the AppExchange, the
stage salesforce.com is willing to give selected partners,
and the aura and mystique that salesforce.com provides
them -- sex appeal is probably the best term. Integrating
with salesforce.com is hot. I mean, salesforce.com is one
of the Big 4 in everyones books, with about 1/30th the
revenues of any of the others. Their run rate is $1.3 billion
as of Dreamforce. Doesnt that tell you something?
Salesforce.com continues to do two things incredibly
well - innovate and market. While the marketing doesnt
actually reect the quality of the innovation, it does get
them noticed. However, its their innovation that shines.
Yet they are a very conservatively and well-run company.
They combine sound business practices with a culture
geared toward innovation (not a combination that lives
together that easily, usually) and probably the best mar-
keting CEO in the world -- Marc Benioff, named recently
San Francisco Executive of the Year by the San Francisco
Business Times. Salesforce.com also swept all three of
the major CRM Market Leader Awards given by CRM
Magazine this year.
Additionally, salesforce.com has made inroads into areas
that they arent traditionally in and will prove, I think,
to be quite formidable. Public Sector is among them.
Their Force.com platform -- especially Ideaforce and
Visualforce -- were used by the Obama Administration to
do several things, including the Obama Transition team
Citizen Brieng Book.
Yet, they have a few things they need to think about too
this year. Nobody gets away free.
First, a clarication: Salesforce.coms marketing claim is
that Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 andChatter are clouds. They are not. They are cloud apps
or cloud services. Custom Cloud 2 can have the case
made that its Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a component
of the cloud. But the cloud per se includes a platform,
infrastructure, storage, SaaS delivery etc.
Now onwards. There are several things that are note-
worthy about Chatter, which is their highly trumpeted
Facebook and Twitter-driven social toolset released at
Dreamforce 2009.
1. It is a serious attempt by salesforce.com to
provide a complete social toolset. In conjunction
with its nicely enhanced sales product (Sales
Cloud 2), customer service product (Service
Cloud 2) and dramatically enhanced customi-
zation capabilities (Custom Cloud 2), Chatter
begins to establish them as a complete Social
CRM player minus a component or two -- no-
tably reasonable native marketing functionality
-- which puts them in the camp currently of onlyOracle, making the same attempt from the CRM
side of the house.
2. Chatters only original piece is the fact that you can
subscribe to data objects -- anyone in any system
you have -- even, say SAP or Microsoft. The
problem now is the lack of lters, which means
nearly an all-or-none subscription to all events
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around that data object -- which diminishes the
value. The rest of Chatter Ive seen elsewhere,
often better executed, but never as aggregated
as this - and whats there is good enough.
The reason I emphasize Chatter is that salesforce.com
seems to be banking a lot of 2010 on the success of this
particular piece of the platform - which I wouldnt. As a
standalone, it doesnt impress at all - at $50 a head, its
expensive and not worthy.As a layer inside of force.com
this becomes impressive and a signicant addition to the
platform worth examining.
How salesforce.com treats this in 2010 is going to be
important because the companys threats are not only
from SAP and Oracle and maybe Microsoft (from Azure)
but also from the dozens of social vendors who are
not only integrating with salesforce.com but claiming a
Social CRM mantle that they may or may not deserve.
The small guys nipping at their heels are good enough to
take some chunks out of the salesforce.com ankle this
year unless salesforce.com stays innovative, concentrat-
ing itself on new market places like public sector where
they can have a competitive impact, stay the course
when it comes to their 2002 plan of being the business
web as they called it then and, nally, position Chatter
where it belongs - inside force.com.
Or else salesforce.com might be calling someone else
their daddy. They are in a great, great position. They con-
trol their own destiny. But we see how that can succeed
for example in baseball (NY Yankees) or fail, cant we?
mICROSOfT
Every year I have to
start out by saying the same thing. Im a fan of Microsoft,but.... Sadly, my projection for 2010 is something of
the same.
I continue to be perplexed by these guys. On the one
hand they do great things that are signicant in the
Social CRM pantheon of things - such as integrate in the
public sector with Neighborhood America (now INgage
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m Sort o metodolog& Togt Process
There is no universally recognized group beyond the
Big Four of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and salesforce.
com. For Parts II and III of this Watchlist, I have whit-
tled down a list of CRM vendors and social vendors
numbering nearly 90 in all. I cut the total list down
to 40 plus. Then I had to distinguish the winners
- those worth watching in 2010 based on a number
of criteria, including, importantly, having enough
information on these companies to make a smart
decision. Other important criteria included the clarity
and consistency of their direction; good technology;
potential impact; customer and analyst thinking about
these companies (outside my own); and whether they
t the criteria for the companies (mostly technology)
to actually be considered among those in the sphere
of Social CRM - since none of them are pure Social
CRM vendors. Their claims to be Social CRM might
have gotten them attention, but several who claimed
it didnt make the cut for one reason or another. For
example, given the maturation of the industry, some
of the companies I included last year because I liked
them a lot -- like Zuora -- arent on this list -- though
I love them even more than last year. They just arent
Social CRM - now that the denition of Social CRM
is approaching something that can be called rigorous
without being called rigor mortis.
As a result, the remaining 40-something choices had
to be separated out. Thus, in Part II youll see the
CRM vendors who will continue to have (or are poised
to have) an impact in the CRM world in 2010 - whichlargely means Social CRM. Youll also see the CRM
vendors who are on a 3 or 6 months Revisit list.
The 3-month Revisit list are those companies that I
thought deserved recognition for the quality of their
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Networks) to create the Public Idea Bank, integrate
MSFT Surface with SAP apps, and give Ray Ozzie the
right resources and lab to do social experimenting.
Additionally, they are a remarkably innovative company
despite their public image of stolid and old, with amaz-
ing projects in the works like Bing Maps, Microsoft Vine,
Project Natal and, of course their strong Microsoft Azure
Cloud platform.
They have the best partner ecosystem in the world and
the most complete, smart partner program Ive ever seen
- bar none.
Their Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications are strong
when it comes to SFA, and customer service, and theyve
made them operationally effective. Theyre working on
mobile, though I still am not and never have been a
big fan of Windows Mobile as a platform. Theyve even
managed to show that Dynamics CRM is a surprisingly
effective and extensible platform, not just a product suite.
(Nikhil Hasija had me as a judge on a competition to watch
about 6-7 partners build an effective CRM app using Dy-
namics CRM in 5 days. They all did it, to varying degrees
of success. But they all did succeed.) Theyve priced
the Live versions of Dynamics CRM (which they stupidly
still insist on calling software plus services) at better than
competitive pricing against their opposition, by nearly
halving the price.
They have a great PR person inAmy Adamsak, from
Waggoner Edstrom who is smart and knows how to stay in
touch with the analysts, etc. she has to. No slouch, she.
YET - and there ALWAYS is a YET - they are just not that
innovative when it comes to CRM and they need to be
when all three of their chief rivals, whatever their aws,
are. They have no visible social presence beyond Neigh-
borhood America. No presence beyond that in all sectors
is a serious mistake.
Even when they are innovative, they dont pursue the op-
portunities that they have, For example, I sat on the Board
of Advisors with Surface - their multipoint touchscreen
display or with their Dynamics CRM Live. It could have
been a market maker. It wasnt though it still remains a
great piece of technology. This isnt to single out Surface,
just a aw in how Microsoft as a company pursues things.
Things die as quickly as they live as far as visibility goes.
Opportunities come, and the ball is dropped. The percep-
tion in the market of them is at best stolid and so so.
They even frustrate their fanboys - among them me.
MSFT is expectedto both be a market leader and an
innovator, and to be perceived as a market leader and an
innovator too, not a follower, But outside of public sector
constituent engagement, Im hard pressed to nd the in-
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offering but one way or the other are just short of
ready for prime time - which, by the way, could also
simply be my lack of information about that. Then
there was the 6-month watchlist, which were those
that I thought still needed to sort their thinking out
to provide some real clarity to their place in the
universe, but had a lot of potential when it came to
Social CRM - though each of them has some issue
to deal with substantial enough to keep them off the
list. Each of these lists will be presented without
individual discussion but with a link to the compa-
nies involved.
So, heres how it all goes down. Part II is the
companies coming from the world of CRM who are
becoming watch-worthy in Social CRM in 2010. The
3 months and 6 months lists in Part II are those CRM
vendors who dont quite make it.
Part III will be the social software vendors -- which
could mean social media monitoring, community
platforms, or even social channels. But what they
all have in common is that they are moving toward
CRM integration in some way - not always in the
right way, but their noses are snifng the right winds.
There will be social vendor-specic 3- and 6-month
lists here, too.
(Continued from previous page)
http://www.publicsectorondemand.com/http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.microsoft.com/maps/resources/news.aspxhttp://www.vine.net/about.aspxhttp://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/?WT.srch=1http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/?WT.srch=1https://partner.microsoft.com/40014052http://crm.dynamics.com/m/default.aspxhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/amy-adamsak/7/3ba/a14http://www.linkedin.com/pub/amy-adamsak/7/3ba/a14http://crm.dynamics.com/m/default.aspxhttps://partner.microsoft.com/40014052http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/?WT.srch=1http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/?WT.srch=1http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/http://www.vine.net/about.aspxhttp://www.microsoft.com/maps/resources/news.aspxhttp://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/ray-ozzies-new-social-lab-what.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29http://www.publicsectorondemand.com/ -
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novation in CRM. Their product is ne, except for market-
ing which is actually starting to be weaker than the pack,
not in the pack since most CRM companies with sup-
posed suites are moving forward to strengthen the social
marketing at least, if not the more traditional campaign
management functionality.
Given that innovation is part of everyones 2010 mantra,
Microsoft needs to step up this year. Im tired of YET,
YET, YET when it comes to speaking of them.
Honestly, I dont care which of the myriad of companies
wins the competitive wars. I couldnt care less if SAP,
Oracle, Microsoft, salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow,
whoever, takes the lead. What I want is for all to succeed
because I want businesses to be protable and customers
to be happy and the social fabric to be right. There is room
for all the companies to get a sufcient piece of the pie to
do that. I dont want losers, I want winners. In the case of
Microsoft, that means innovation, up front, 2010. Step it
up so I dont have to say YET again in 2011.
Okay, thats it for this part. Next part are the next tier of
CRM focused companies. Then comes the social and
other companies moving into the Social CRM space.
Part II: Te Annal Locs
These are the other players of CRM. These are major
league unto themselves one way or the other and com-
panies that Im going to be paying close attention to in
2010 - for better or for worse. Luckily for all of us, this is a
substantially larger marketplace than just the Big Four. In
fact, Cognizant, SAS and Sage are bigger than salesforce.
com when it comes to both revenues and scope. So
maybe size doesnt matter after all.
Remember though, this is a Watch List, not a Love List.
NETSuITE
In the beginning of
2009, CEO Zach
Nelson told me that he intended to be more social in 2009.
Now, if you know Zach, this wasnt a personal statement; he
already is about as social a human being as it gets. The man
knows how to party.
So I watched for this throughout the year and he did what
he usually does, which is to strengthen an already strong
enterprise SaaS product. Some of the notable efforts were:
Strengthening of their Financial edition with
more cloud-ready capabilities.
A signicant set of additions to OpenAir, an al-
ready sterling professional services application,
acquired by NetSuite in 2008. To that end,
they acquired QuickArrow, a cloud based PSA
solution that they then began integrating into
OpenAir to extend the PSA product functional-
ity and the client list.
Acquiring a series of nancial certications in
England, Wales, and Germany among others.
In December, they automatically made their
customers VAT-Compliant (given changes in
the VAT requirements) while they slept. In
other words, they, as always, took care of
the operational and legal block-and-tackling
that has to be part of an enterprise softwares
functionality.
A solid set of improvements to an already internationally
strong feature rich set of applications and services.
But they also hinted at what was to come during the late
3Q and early 4Q with a few rather smart and sexy mobile
applications including bringing NetSuite ERP and OpenAir
to the iPhone and the Blackberry.
But this wasnt a year of pure karma love. They maintained
series of campaigns that I have always found misplaced -
their relentless direct attacks on SAP and a lesser series of
attacks on Sage and salesforce.com throughout the year.
I wish theyd stop these overt valueless efforts that either
were attacks on the specic rival they had, or took the
form of we took (ll in the blank) company away from (ll
in the blank) that theyve persisted in doing for years. My
take: Who really cares who they stole from whom? Their
products and services are good enough to stand on their
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own merits. I will say there was one silver lining in all of this.
At one point, they actually did approach the competition
the right way by announcing the availability of SuiteCloud
Connect, which would integrate NetSuite and salesforce.
com. Thats the way to go about being competitive. Fill in
the holes the competition has, play to your own strengths.
I have to admit, though, one of their more generalized cam-
paigns like this was really funny. They offered to give you a
cheaper price for NetSuite if in exchange you gave up your
on premise application - they called it Cash for Clunkers.
THAT was funny - and not aimed at any one company.
But that was the only negative in what was turning out to
be an otherwise solid year for NetSuite. But--I remembered
that Zach said he was going to get more social in 2009.
Damned if he didnt come through at the end of the year
- a Twitter feed integration and far more importantly an al-
liance with InsideView to cover both CRM and ERP intel-
ligence - NetSuites rst premier partnership with anyone.
This was a great move, given InsideViews preeminent
position in the social sales intelligence market. So Zach
came through wisely.
Whats there to watch in 2010? A very good company
with a childish marketing streak that has a lot to offer.
What makes this all good is that NetSuite continues to
build on a solid foundation and constantly improve the
basics when it comes to process and even compliance.
But they now are venturing at least with one or two toes in
the water into the social side of services and applications
- for them an important move. Once again, NetSuite is a
company to watch for 2010. And maybe even a company
to like a lot, if theyll just stop being attack dogs. I likethem anyway.
RIGhTNOw
RightNow has been on a roll the
last couple of years. Theyve seen
Social CRM and theyre acting on
it. Their 4Q release of the new version of the RightNow CX
customer experience platform reects what is so good
about this company. They actually create well thought out
and well-endowed services and applications that meet
what social customers are now demanding. For example,
who else has not just the feature du jour-- an embedded
Twitter stream -- but also a community building platform, a
web self-service capability, and tools for traditional agent
contact centers among a myriad of other capabilities. Their
commitment to the Cloud and Cloud connectors is strong;
though Cloud Monitor, their current agship when it comes
to the cloud and social media monitoring, is still a bit light
with only monitoring Twitter and YouTube feeds. However, it
does have embedded sentiment analysis, which is good on
the surface, though I dont know how deep it is since I have
yet to see it.
All in all, RightNow RX customer experience platform is
without a doubt one of the best, most comprehensive in
the entire software/services world. And it is well executed.
They are also a solid company with 800 employees,
approximately $150 million in revenue in 2009, and about
$100 million in the bank.
But even more than that, theyve done something whichVERY few companies have been willing to undertake.
Theyve transformed their culture and created an organiza-
tion based on that appropriate cultural transformation. To
see how it works, pay attention to their newest job position
- customer success managers. These are the people whose
only job is making the RightNow customers successful.
They dont have quotas; they dont have bogies. Their
performance is based on how successful their customers
are. I know few companies willing to invest in this level ofcustomer value creation. RightNow is right on target with
this effort - a key indicator to their cultural change.
But once again, there is a but -- and its around their
messaging. For reasons unbeknownst to me, at their
RightNow User Conference in October, they decided to
say that since CRM has failed, that CX wasnotCRM.
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They kept insisting that they didnt want to create a new
category but of course by being not CRM you are cre-
ating an are something which makes it a new category.
Plus, they used me to make their case on the same web
location that calls CX the big brother of CRM, in an ap-
parent contradiction. They claimed that Ive been quoted
as saying that 70 percent of CRM projects fail. I never
said that; Gartner did -- and I debunked this in my post on
their conference last October. But they havent changed
this page where they make this claim of what I said (and I
presume, other pages) so Ill reiterate it. Gartner said that
in 2002 with their 55%-70% CRM project failure claim.
Since then, everyone including them, pretty much recog-
nizes the success of CRM with 55-70% of the projects
succeeding as the industry matured and learned from its
mistakes - like most industries do. For god sakes, its a
$13 billion industry that grew during the recession and is
expected to grow more. I hope they remove that claim.
Though, if I were them, Id be more concerned about the
not CRM marketing - since most of their prospects and
clients arent going to not think of them that way - and
they are a CRM company.
Honestly, though, I still think the world of them. They are
doing the right thing at the right time. If theyd focus onthe value of RightNow CX and forget the not CRM stuff,
theyd be spot on for 2010. Lets see.
SAGE
This might be the company
that made the largest leap in
2009. Not only have they mastered the REST architecture
that is becoming increasingly important to Social CRM
and mobile devices, but they also have introduced social
features in useful ways (via their Saleslogix, SageCRM
and evenACT! 2010 products) so that you can see social
feeds for customers and accounts. This is on top of
utilizing that simplied architecture (think HTTP) that is so
smart when it comes to the Sage target market - small
and the lower end of mid-sized businesses.
What makes Sage a great story and something that I
expect to see develop further in 2010 is that this is a
company that was behind the eight-ball for years - always
a generation and a half back when it came to how they
architected their CRM applications. Plus their partner
channel would compete with itself. I actually saw a Sage
partner (twice happened - two separate partners) decide
to have SageCRM compete with SalesLogix CRM in a
meeting with potential buyers.
But theyve done wonders with both their CRM products
and their partner channels - not only adjusting to the con-
temporary customer trends and demands but also giving
the partners a forum to interact with them.
Theyve even done something that I never expected.
They made ACT! 2010 Premium a nearly SFA product -
it still lacks business rules/workows and strong pipeline
management. Also, using Lithium, they created an ACT!
community that had 8.9 million page views in its rst 12
months. Theyve made what was a stodgy product into an
exceptional one -- as they have done, to a lesser extent,
with SalesLogix and SageCRM.
But they havent stopped there. They have developed
solid mobile products for their CRM offerings, and theyare moving SalesLogix into the cloud, though that isnt
a nal project yet. They have folks like Ryan Zuk who
knows how to stay in touch with and retain the good will
of analysts and journalists, which -- as ridiculous as it
sounds - is something that IT companies have to do to
remain visible and competitive.
So we have a company that is necessarily contemporary
with technical and functional trends, on target with their tar-
get market, not getting greedy, and doing what they have
to do when it comes to visibility. All in all, solid as a rock.
This is where any nagging doubts remain. Rocks are
solid, which means they dont ow - and resting on laurels
is something that Sage/Best Software/SalesLogix (past
ownerships) has had a tendency to do in the past. There
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are some things they need to do and improvements they
need to make. Among them:
1. Keep innovating even though they are now on
target. I dont know what that means for them.
Could be more in the mobile realm; could be the
incorporation of more SMB useful social features
2. Keep eyes on the prize - dont get greedy as so
many other companies have and trick yourself
into believing that you have a different target
market.
3. Do a bit better - not a lot but a bit - when it
comes to thought leadership for the SMB CRM
market.
If Sage does these things, their ascent will continue. If
they dont, they might prove me wrong in 2010. That
would not be good.
COGNIzANT
This is one of my
most out-of-place
and yet most ap-
propriate picks for 2010. IBM is the only consulting rm I
have ever chosen for this category in the past and usually
thats because of Lotus Connections. IBM is very much
the enterprise solution provider. But Cognizant is here for
something that they are doing uniquely, doing interestingly
and doing well. That would be not just CRM consult-
ing, but also building a Social CRM practice that is not
absolutely identical to the CRM practice.
For those of you who dont know Cognizant - just think
a systems integrator/strategic consultancy with 66,000
consultants in total. Their CRM consultancy alone has
1,400+ associates worldwide and is not shy about draw-
ing on their Master Data Management (MDM), Customer
Data Integration (CDI) and Business Process Management
(BPM) for consulting support when need be, making the
pool that much bigger.
But what they are here for is not just the sheer size of their
CRM consulting practice, but their creation of a Social
CRM practice in 2009. While it currently is small, with 20
consultants (though, again, they can borrow from within
Cognizant for stuff like CMS integration), I want you to think
about it. Who do you know that has SCRM consultants at
all? Thats 20 more than any other company that Im aware
of in the consulting realm, including the other giants like
Accenture. The fact that Cognizant is creating this nascent
organization not only validates Social CRM as a legitimate
practice (among other things of course) but at the same
time speaks volumes about the visionary leadership of their
vice president of customer solutions, Peter Grambs.
The fact that they have a practice is well and good, but
they back the practice up with content and that makes
a huge difference. They are actually developing a Social
CRM framework for both technology and strategy and
investing resources in products that can support them.
For example, they have a sentiment analyzer that I saw
not too long ago that is a solid entry into the tool belt.
This is not a commercial product, but a tool for their
work and their clients to use. Honestly, with not much
more work, it could be a very sellable sentiment analysis
tool - competitive in most ways. To top this off, they
have someone actually positioned as an evangelist, Prem
Kumar, whose responsibility is just that - not sales, not
service, but evangelism for SCRM. Prem, one of the rising
stars of CRM, made his appearance in thought leadership
circles in 2009.
How could I not pick Cognizant?
However, like everyone on this list, Cognizant needs to
continue to support this SCRM practice and grow it in
2010. Budget concerns are with everyone now, and new
and innovative thinking is not usually the last to lose funds
so to speak. But theyre off to a good start. Watch themin 2010 as this thing sprouts.
ELOquA
Eloqua has always
been a top of the
heap kind of marketing automation solution - in my think-
ing, the best of them for a while - formerly very expensive,
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now better priced than they were. However, for 2010, to
make it onto this list, you have to be in line with where
the market is going -- and social marketing integration
is one of the key places it is going. Eloqua is up to the
challenge, going well beyond just the nonetheless valu-
able Share-to-Social that many marketing automation
(especially email marketing) rms have embedded in
their feature set. This year, Eloqua went horizontal and
vertical when it came to expanding their already classic
marketing automation platform. On the one hand, they
added social media monitoring generally and share-to-
social for their email capabilities. Even better, they are
integrating with the Pedowitz Groups Sweet Suite, a
comprehensive social marketing suite that allows real time
monitoring of prospects and customers and then, based
on the response, can initiate appropriate and sometimes
automated responses and offers - and so much more
than that. Sweet Suite is currently integrated with Eloqua
right down to the dashboard.
Its easy to conclude that Eloqua has rightfully swallowed
the social marketing Kool Aid. But lets also see, via CRM
industry thought leader Bruce Culberts wordsmithing,
what Eloqua has in store in 2010 and three reasons why
they belong on this list:
1. Grot in te Global Enterprise: Eloqua is a
workhorse in the enterprise and currently has
one of the most comprehensive solutions for
sophisticated multichannel Marketing Automa-
tion for global companies. Large deployments
are not unusual for Eloqua. Their ability to
provide customers the capability to scale and
process millions of automated marketing and
sales transaction with large data sets is truly
impressive. Eloqua has international language
and global product support, a mature API and a
number of successful integrations with complex
legacy systems. As multinational companies ag-
gressively deploy Marketing Automation in 2010
Eloqua should benet greatly.
2. Prodct Direction: Eloqua has big plans in
2010 to release a whole new architecture,
data model and user interface. You will hardly
recognize the new Eloqua, yet you will because
the new interface is very marketing and sales
user friendly and designed more as a Web 2.0
application with emphasis on ease of use. In
the backend they will be offering improvements
and more exibility in almost every aspect of
the offering. With these improvements and
advancements Eloqua looks to once again setthe standard for Marketing Automation.
3. Good People and Spport: In working directly
with Eloqua I have found the people to be
very committed to their customers success.
They are easy to work with and do what they
commit to. They have a rich set of intellectual
capital and a very robust knowledge portal to
share these best practices with both customers
and partners. They provide multiple levels of
support for a customer including global product
support, dedicated customer success mangers,
and a robust set of global partners ready to help
clients leverage their investment in Eloqua.
Good enough for me. Now Eloqua has to live up to all
these expectations in 2010. Last year, they were on
revisit this year they made it.
SwORD-CIBOODLE
These guys may have
been my nd of the
year in 2009. I knew
nothing of them until a dear friend of mine, Ted Hartley,
got the job as COO at the company. This got me inter-
ested in seeing what they did and what their product was
like. My professional interest (meaning friendship didnt
buy a free love ya pass to the product) was particularly
piqued after I got a demo of the product in Chicago and
my investigation grew. I spoke with them, saw the product
in action, met with their customers and came to the con-
clusion that they did something for the customer service
world incredibly well - better than any other product I saw.
That would be keeping the ordinary, ordinary.
Keeping the ordinary, ordinary is perhaps the most
important aspect of what a customer service applica-
tion can support. Most customer service actions are not
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particularly emotional exceptions -- like complaints and
the meltdowns and inadequacies associated with them.
The vast majority of customer service inquiries are just
ordinary e.g. the address of something, or how to do
something. Many can be handled without personal direct
contact with an agent via knowledge bases and web self-
service. However, if the contact is an ordinary inquiry,
screwing it up creates an immensely dissatised customer
because they would have had low expectations unfullled.
Not bad, but a utilitarian low level. However, by being
able to handle thousands of inquiries a day and keeping
the ordinary, ordinary you have immensely beneted the
company and customer.
Of course, our industry cant just call it that so we have to
create categories to explain things. So we created what
Forrester called process-based CRM. This would be a
focus around providing well-integrated, scalable embed-
ded best practices solution that a large enterprise could
adopt. In fact, Forrester did a process-based CRM Wave
in 2009 that Sword-Ciboodle won.
The accolades came for them beyond that. This com-
pany not only won numerous awards including a coveted
(by me) CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition SuperStah!
award for customer service. They are quadrupling their
U.S. workforce, hiring like crazy to be able to meet and
sustain the strong interest they are seeing in their solution.
But...2010 promises to be an important year for them
(for everyone it seems). Social CRM needs to be on their
agenda to continue to be both interesting to potential cus-
tomers for them, and to be able to provide support for the
customer engagement strategies at the customer service
level for those who need technology to do that. How theydo that - build or buy or partner - is moot in their case.
They could go on as they currently are constructed and, I
suspect, they will continue to be successful. But to really
crack through, providing some Social CRM capabilities in
2010 is the way that they are going to have to go to keep
the ordinary, ordinary.
SAS
This choice, I have to admit, is
both one that makes me happy
and one that Im almost reluctant to make. On the plus
side, they are a company that Ive admired for their
culture forever. First, they are consistently named one of
the best places in the United States to work for year after
year. Second, they dont stray from what they do extreme-
ly well, meaning they build on their strength as a rm that
makes analytics tools. Third, in a somewhat myopic but
still productive way, they are attuned to what are typically
going to be the contemporary trends that will have a last-
ing impact - meaning arent fads - and then develop the
tools that businesses need - provided that its in the realm
of what SAS does really well.
Hopefully, that makes sense to you. What I mean is
simple. SAS in 2009, decided that since analytics on the
on the one hand, and management on the other are their
strong suits, they need to develop products that will take
the social data, slice it, dice it and come up with insights
- not just data aggregation and some organized way of
looking at it. To that end, they are looking at the broad
brush stroke - capturing the data from the unstructured
world of conversation - but also being able to be granular
- who are the inuencers and who do they inuence. Their
overall Marketing and Customer Experience toolsets are
incredibly deep, play to their strengths, and are potential
market leaders, especially around customer experience
and now, social network analysis, a particularly exciting
tool that will help identify key inuencers in its positive
role and do fraud detection in its preventive role.
Additionally, they are nallystarting to pay attention to
mind share, using the incredibly capable Angela Lip-
scomb to reach out to analysts etc. This is just a start.
All in all, SAS nally is making the social CRM grade -
long overdue but a beginning.
But what makes me reluctant is what always has. I think
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that they continue to be decient in how they position
themselves in the market. Their approaches are bland and
traditional, no matter how hard they try to spice them up
or make them relevant. The best they achieve is cute
with their You Can ads. While I understand tradition -
there is a comfort level that 30 years of business success
provides - what I dont understand is why SAS, which
has exceptional products when it comes to customer
experience, dont build their campaigns and channels to
the rhythm of the social customers expected experience.
Everyone else is doing or attempting to do just that.
My concern is thus - even with a great product set, if you
dont market well, if you dont capture mind share - if
you dont feel the beat of the social customer, you
can suffer. So 2010 puts SAS in a great but dangerous
place, They are nailing it with their products but they have
to step up with a much better go to market strategy.
They are doing a few things in that direction. Hopefully,
because I really like companies that treat their employees
well, they will succeed.
SuGARCRm
SugarCRM has
always been a
company well worth watching -- both for their successes
and for their somewhat puzzling transformations. From
my perspective, as puzzling as they can be, they have
been more successful than not and they have had an
impact on the market which far exceeds their size.
One reason for their success is that they have a lot to
offer in the marketplace. Their 30,000-strong development
community and the release of a strong new version in
SugarCRM 5.5 bode well for them. Theyve been add-
ing Cloud Connectors that will tie the Sugar system to
third party data sources including Hoovers, Jigsaw and
Zoominfo - all smart choices. They have a strong mobile
administration capability and many mobile vendors are
tying their apps to SugarCRM, as are social vendors like
InsideView. They have a social feed builder of sorts that
resembles but is not as strong as salesforce Chatters
social feeds - allowing you as an internal customer to
subscribe to activity within the company. Their open
source developers community SugarForge had one of
its members create a connector to allow Twitter users to
tweet inside the Sugar system. SugarForge has been a
rich source of capabilities for SugarCRM. They alleviate
the quality control concerns by making sure that core
functionality is developed by internal teams, not Sugar-
Forge, though the talent on SugarForge is unmistakable.
In addition to their strategy for continuous improvement
(though not revolutionary innovation), they also understand
that the customer is looking for stability, too. To that ef-
fect, in 2009, they changed their pricing with Community
Edition remaining free, Pro at $360 per user per year, and
Enterprise at $600 per user per year. Thats right. Per year.
They decided to go to a completely partner-driven sales
model which, given their past history with partner pro-
grams, was a difcult move to make. Larry Augustin, in a
useful video interview with the VAR Guy, claims that two-
thirds of SugarCRMs revenue comes from the channel
now - which indicates to me that one-third comes from
direct sales. Perhaps they are rethinking a pure partner
channel, or else its just a long transition to make.
One thing that sparked their moves was a change of
CEO this year which, regardless of merit, creates some
turmoil as the new guy who is actually a shareholder of
SugarCRM -- Larry Augustin, a very capable guy -- has
to stamp the company with his unique signature in order
for things to move forward. That takes time - and time is
precious in a roiling, ever changing, customer-demanding
market - though I have no doubt they will make thechanges work for them.
However, this is also a big transition year for SugarCRM
because they need to stop seeing themselves as the
open source CRM alternative. Yes, they are that, but
they also are the only real open source player of any
consequence and, when it boils down to it, most of the
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regular players now have open source components
which mitigate an open source CRM alternative as
something of great value. Which means open source is
less of a differentiator than it used to be.
Plus, they have some very aggressive goals in 2010, look-
ing to double their business which is pretty aggressive
no matter how you cut it.
Their very success means that they have to position
themselves differently in the market place. Theyve
dened the open source market in CRM. They now have
to prove that they provide more than that. They provide a
exible, well-supported platform that can be delivered in
any way the customer likes - on premise or on demand
for a justiable price. While they remain decient in social
tools as of now, its to their credit that they are getting
started there. But whether or not they can come up
with a clear way of differentiation beyond Open Source
remains to be seen. They are a talented, exciting bunch.
Now comes the tough part.
hELPSTREAm
In 2009, Help-
stream was
one of the companies that I saw as a harbinger of things to
come - a company whose products actually reected Social
CRM with a focus on service communities as a business
model for companies. Even though they were light on
agent-based capabilities in any traditional sense, they had
enough chops to integrate a strong workow and business
rules engine so that problems that customers raised or
even solved could be routed to the appropriate parties or
service answers could be integrated into a knowledge base.
In other words, they were a solution with a new model that
was gaining credence as they delivered the model.
But that hasnt only been the strength of their solution.
CEOed rst by Tony Nemelka and then Bob Wareld,
they had two intellectually strong leaders who have led
them to a buzzworthy leadership position when it came to
the Social CRM market and to some thought leadership
in the space also, which is highly unusual for a vendor
company of their size. Theyve done a very good ebook
on Social CRM (registration necessary). They tout a
Social CRM Virtuous Cycle (a kind of very coolly
medieval name) which places customer service at the
pinnacle of Social CRM - which, while probably a little
bit self-serving, is also probably right.
Their long-standing (such as it is) strategy deserves some
kudos, too. Among other aspects, theyve been integrat-
ing with the more traditional (whatever that means)
CRM systems. For example, they now are partnered with
marketing automation up and comer Marketo and with
Eloqua (see above). Another aspect: Theyre integrated
with salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand.
But their strategy goes well beyond simple integration
with CRM or social systems. Its probably best reected
by the Marketo alliance really, which is a way of provid-
ing the missing pieces that a company might need
- as components or as a platform. Helpstream denes
itself as the in betweenness (though thats my term,
not theirs) when it comes to Social CRM. Their strong
workow and business rules engine can be an asset to
companies that are trying to provide social tools but have
no workow or business rules engine - a necessary CRM
component. Their customer communities can be used
as possible components for companies that have a more
traditional agent-based model so that the contemporary
and traditional approaches to customer service can meld.
Using the model they seem to have with Marketo, they
provide the customer service component of a Social CRM
suite, while Marketo provides the marketing pillar. (NB:
For some reason, Marketos sales pillar is the Salesforce.
com Twitter integration, which is one of the reasons that
Marketo is on my revisit list, not my watch list). All in all,
Helpstream is a company that provides solid products/
services, has an interesting and differentiable strategy
and, a rarity, has a strong visionary leadership.
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But I do have a problem with them, though its not a
problem the way you might think of one.
Simply put, I cant get a handle on how well or poorly they
are actually doing. Ive seen their ROI numbers, when it
comes to customer community solutions for customer
service problems. They have a nice looking customer list
with a number of high tech customers and some marquee
names like Toshiba and Johns Hopkins.
But what I dont know and cant seem to nd out is how
is exactly how they are doing - what their pipeline is
like, how customers are responding, what their revenue
numbers are, what they are planning for 2010, and how
big their base is. Some of that is private company lip lock
- I get that. But some of it should be exposed and is just
downright puzzling as to why I cant nd it.
They are going to need to step up their public exposure
next year if they are to continue to be a leading voice in
social CRM. But I remain bullish on these guys because I
know what they have. What they do is the question that I
hope they answer in 2010.
APLICOR
This is,
partly due to
themselves, one of the most underestimated companies
in the CRM world. They are a longstanding SaaS CRM
vendor with a great reputation with their customers, a
solid presence in domains like the public sector, and a
highly scalable product that has done well enough to
create a record revenue year (up 40%) during recession-
driven 2009. They have an incredibly astute and very cool
CEO Chuck Schaefer who thinks at the level of a thought
leader, rather than just a corporate manager, though he
can do that too.
Aplicor is a company that knows how to execute. They
have deployments in the thousands of users that have
been successful over a period of years. They have a
product that functionally competes and in some cases
exceeds the best SaaS products on the market.
They are decient in two areas - rst the execution of
social capabilities with their CRM platform, something
necessary for social customer love. Second, marketing,
which seems to be a theme this year. They dont pay
enough attention to getting attention in a marketplace
that is increasingly dened by the number of messages
cluttering up the human individual brain. Attention is a
currency in a manner of speaking and its one currency
Aplicor doesnt trade in. You can only go so long by doing
everything via referral. Thats one avenue among others.
Also, just using social media is a limitation that you dont
want to have, either. Maybe traditional media isnt cool,
but it has some effect on the hearts and minds - though
not often that cost-effective. The combination of differ-
ent traditional and contemporary avenues works best, it
seems -- depending on the company. Most importantly,
though, mindshare matters.
To that end, Aplicor has taken one important step, hiring
Chris Bucholz to run a mostly agnostic social channel
for them, ForecastingClouds.com - a very wise decision.
Chris is one of the true talents in the social CRM world and
the reason that the formerly important InsideCRM was im-
portant at the time. Now he is Aplicors rst step in doing
some seriously good marketing and thought leadership.
But that, course, is not enough. So well see how Aplicor
handles its way-too-low prole in 2010. They got the
tools, now lets see the are.
16
Reisiting Later in 2010
Tree mont List
1. Unica
2. Cast Iron
3. Zoho (CRM)
4. Marketo
5. Maximizer
Six mont List
1. Neocase
2. Parature
3. LoopFuse
4. Genius
http://www.helpstream.com/site_company/customers.htmlhttp://www.helpstream.com/site_company/customers.htmlhttp://twitter.com/cschaefferhttp://twitter.com/cschaefferhttp://www.forecastingclouds.com/http://www.forecastingclouds.com/http://www.unica.com/http://www.castiron.com/http://www.zoho.com/crm/http://www.marketo.com/index.phphttp://www.maximizer.com/http://www.neocasesoftware.com/http://www.parature.com/http://www.loopfuse.com/http://www.genius.com/http://www.genius.com/http://www.loopfuse.com/http://www.parature.com/http://www.neocasesoftware.com/http://www.maximizer.com/http://www.marketo.com/index.phphttp://www.zoho.com/crm/http://www.castiron.com/http://www.unica.com/http://www.forecastingclouds.com/http://www.forecastingclouds.com/http://twitter.com/cschaefferhttp://twitter.com/cschaefferhttp://www.helpstream.com/site_company/customers.htmlhttp://www.helpstream.com/site_company/customers.html -
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Part III: Social Copanies and
Social Cannels
This is going to be my most eccentric set of selections
because its a new group coming into an older world
and making claims that they may or may not be able to
support. That means Im going to look at social enti-ties: Companies that encompass community platforms,
social business platforms, social networking platforms,
and social media monitoring capabilities. Channels that
have taken on the role of locations but locations with a
CRM twist as we shall see. Do all the companies that
Im going to put on the watchlist meet the claim of being
social CRM? No, but who cares? None of the companies
or any of the channels meets the criteria for a complete
Social CRM technology suite. What they do provide is amore mature and sophisticated capability to support the
engagement of customers than weve had in the past -
which is the strategy that Social CRM supports. Though
by no means are we in a mature market - puhleeze.
Te Social Copanies
In 2009, the social software vendors began to call them-
selves Social CRM enmasse and rather suddenly. Im not
100% sure why but I have to speculate that there is a lotmore money in calling oneself Social CRM than social me-
dia and it opens the way into an established $13 billion plus
market. Plus, strategically, it allows access to both major
enterprise software vendors for partnerships and directly
to larger enterprises. Social software originated on the
consumer side but the market for them is on the business
side - which they clearly are aware of and which will drive a
different set of behaviors by them then they are used to.
But thats speculative and not meant to be derogatory in
any way. That is the reality and they were recognizing the
reality of the marketplace.
However, that also created a good deal of confusion and
some sadly overextended discussions on what was Social
CRM (good for awhile and then not so good) and who
was Social CRM and who wasnt. My who at this point
is who cares?
Several of the social vendors who make the Social CRM
claim are productively doing what they should to be part
of the space. Ive chosen ve of them that I think make
the grade and are doing everything they can to be worth
watching in 2010.
LIThIum
Unlike the bulk of the
companies on this
watchlist, Lithium actu-
ally has done the right things from both a thought leader-
ship and a marketing standpoint to position themselves as
a Social CRM company (though I know theyd like to be
the Social CRM company). When it comes to creating a
market presence, the always charming and smart Sanjay
Dholakia, CMO of Lithium, does a really good job. For
example, if you remember earlier this year (and if you care
at all), Lithium held the First Social CRM Virtual Summit, es-
sentially pulling a coup. They had a superpowered group of
speakers at the event - so to speak - including, ahem, me;
Brent Leary; Ray Wang: Jeremiah Owyang; and Dr. Natalie
Petouhoff (all on my analysts all stars list) among others,
and they had a stellar attendance with 1,300 folks, about
450 from outside the U.S. (Ahh, love those virtual environ-
ments). Unlike many of the companies on either list, they
dont have a problem marketing even though they might
overreach when it comes to claiming #1 status. There is no
one that has the right to that claim now. Just an FYI.
They also are well nanced, having just received a Series
C funding of $18 million U.S., which will provide them with
a lot of latitude when it comes to building out their story
including the products they need to deliver.
Coupled with their good marketing moves is a solid com-
munity platform.
First and foremost, because Lithium founder Lyle Fong
was one of the worlds greatest gamers, they have a
17
http://www.lithium.com/https://www.linkedin.com/reg/join-pprofile?key=1472753&authToken=0oVo&authType=name&lnk=vw_pprofile&locale=en_UShttps://www.linkedin.com/reg/join-pprofile?key=1472753&authToken=0oVo&authType=name&lnk=vw_pprofile&locale=en_UShttp://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Social-CRM-Virtual-Summit/bd-p/VSCRM-2009-11-11;jsessionid=090E1AFC1DD7D3922856868A451E5612http://twitter.com/brentlearyhttp://twitter.com/rwang0http://twitter.com/jowyanghttp://twitter.com/drnataliehttp://twitter.com/drnataliehttp://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100106006176&newsLang=enhttp://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100106006176&newsLang=enhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/lylefonghttp://www.linkedin.com/in/lylefonghttp://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100106006176&newsLang=enhttp://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100106006176&newsLang=enhttp://twitter.com/drnataliehttp://twitter.com/drnataliehttp://twitter.com/jowyanghttp://twitter.com/rwang0http://twitter.com/brentlearyhttp://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Social-CRM-Virtual-Summit/bd-p/VSCRM-2009-11-11;jsessionid=090E1AFC1DD7D3922856868A451E5612https://www.linkedin.com/reg/join-pprofile?key=1472753&authToken=0oVo&authType=name&lnk=vw_pprofile&locale=en_UShttps://www.linkedin.com/reg/join-pprofile?key=1472753&authToken=0oVo&authType=name&lnk=vw_pprofile&locale=en_UShttp://www.lithium.com/ -
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gamers paradigm which means theyve got a terric
interface and scalability in their DNA.
While there is no time to get into the details of their product
since Id be writing the 5th edition of CRM at the Speed of
Light to have the room to do that, I do want to talk about
one product component. That would be CRM Connect,
their native connector for CRM systems, considered a part
of their Social CRM suite. Lithium, I have to presume, used
CRM Connect when they integrated several years ago with
RightNow. They not only provided the communities for
RightNow customers etc. but also the community platform
that RightNow used until their acquisition of HiveLive.
But and again (there is always a but), the integrations with
CRM seemed to have stopped beyond the original Right-
Now partnership and the usual one with salesforce.
com. There doesnt seem to be much other interaction
with Lithium and the CRM community that I can see. This
isnt meant to go to the strengths or weaknesses of CRM
Connect. It might be a great product - or not - but it