aheadCRM

After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with  Jon Ferrara  again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course,  Nimble . As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in 1990. Jon is also a very vocal advocate of sales and marketing being first of all “human to human”, something that he claims that most CRM systems are not good at. Consequently, he dubs these systems as “Customer Reporting Systems” as they do not excel at helping salespeople giving a good look at the persons they interact with but are more focused on reporting. Being in the CRM world for a long time myself I cannot really disagree with him about this fact itself; we might have a discussion on what CRM overall is and why it went the (wrong) way it took. Some thoughts on what I think CRM is and how Nimble stands in this, along with some thoughts on how to go ahead with Nimble will come below … Historically CRM systems require a lot of ...

Salesforce  acquires  DemandWare. Lots has been written about the acquisition itself, so I will not comment on the fact itself. Instead I will ponder about implications on Microsoft. After all Microsoft is the remaining of the big CRM players that does not have an ecommerce platform of its own. Oracle acquired ATG in 2010. SAP's engagement in ecommerce culminated in the 2013 acquisition of Hybris, after having Internet Sales Solutions since 1996 or so, keywords for the connoisseurs are ISA or WCEM (and I will not mention any R/3 transaction codes here ... ). That leaves Microsoft. All other players I would position in another league - which doesn't mean that they are bad solutions. With ATG, Hybris, and Demandware the major independent platforms are taken, too; with the exception of Intershop, maybe. That is, if one assumes that IBM doesn't intend to sell off its Websphere. Microsoft pursuing a cloud strategy with their own infras...

Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The conference, organized by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the...

Bots are all the rage currently. By the looks of it they are at the peak of the hype cycle. We will see their deep fall into the trough of disillusionment soon. After all the well-known examples based on the Facebook messenger are  somewhat underwhelming , to formulate it carefully. There is not much artificial intelligence visible - nor needed - to provide services like these. They also come with a poor user interface. And this combination of hyped examples, mixing up chatbots and AI, has the potential to kill customer experience. They certainly kill the user experience. Unless, this is, that these machines already reached a level of intelligence that they are magic to my simple mind... Which I doubt. To be sure, there are AIs around that amaze us: IBM's Watson, Apples Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google's Now, ...   even Microsoft’s infamous Tay which got a pretty bad reputation in no time, to name but a few. Recently a whole class of graduate students didn't real...

Today SAP and Microsoft announced a new  partnership centred around HANA, Azure, Office365, and Fiori . This marks another step in a 20 year cooperation (and nowadays coopetition) between these two software giants. The stated goals are "empowering organizations to advance their digital transformations". “Together with SAP, we are bringing new levels of integrations between our products that provide businesses with enhanced collaboration tools, new insights from data and a hyper-scale cloud to grow and seize new opportunities ahead” as Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft puts it. In McDermotts words the two companies will "unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications”. As a part of this SAP HANA - and hence SAP applications running on HANA, will now be run on Microsofts Azure infrastructure. Further, the companies will develop integrations between SAPs cloud solutions and Microsoft's productivity solutions that a...

Yesterday SAP announced the general availability in the US of its SAP Anywhere solution. It is "specifically designed to help meet the e-commerce and customer interaction needs of small businesses with 10 to 200 employees". SAP Anywhere is a fully cloud-based solution that covers all front-office (i.e. customer facing) processes of running a business from inventory via sales to customer service, including mobile PoS capabilities. This includes multi channel commerce and -marketing. It is purpose built from the ground up instead of being a 'slimmed-down' enterprise solution. In an emphasis on its ecosystem strategy SAP directly partnered up with Google and Paypal to facilitate digital marketing and payment integration. The mobile first approach seems to come directly out of Microsoft's playbook. Being targeted towards SMBs SAP boasts a setup time of 40 hours, i.e. one work week.  My PoV While it is hard to count the number of (not so successful) appro...

The May 2016 version of Gartner's magic quadrant sees SAP in a challenger position, with the favourite competition Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft being leaders - all of them dwarfed by the perceived strength of Salesforce. Lets have a brief look into what Gartner thinks about these four companies. Salesforce Salesforce is again a clear leader in the quadrant, mainly based upon the fact that they have the best sold solution, which is probably due to sticking effects of their other successful products. This attracts partners and apparently has become a kind of virtuous circle although there are a good number of shortcomings: The product is missing industry specific functionality but is 'fairly generic' lack of master data management functionality, which needs to come in via other products the new Lightning development environment and user interface is far from mainstream it is expensive and raises concerns about vendor lock in, especially when there are oth...