Some quick updates on some open-source vendors and companies we have recently covered in the pages — both paper and Web — of CRM:

• Open-source software company xTuple recently announced that, despite the economic recession, the company realized record revenue growth in 2008. Sales were up 250 percent year-over-year compared with 2007, according to information provided by xTuple. A leader in last year’s Open-Source CRM category for CRM’s Market Awards issue, the company looks to continue growing with its latest product release loaded with more CRM features and other improvements.

• Technical support provider Geeks on the Way (GOTW) was recently named the winner of the CRM Implementation & User Adoption Program category in the third annual 2009 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Profiled in our December issue of CRM, the company utilized open-source pioneer SugarCRM to keep pace and scale effectively to its ever-growing business. Stay tuned to find out if GOTW can continue its ambitious growth plans with the help of SugarCRM.

Wendy Lea

Meet Wendy Lea, the new CEO of Web 2.0 customer service site, Get Satisfaction. Lea brings a breadth of knowledge to Get Satisfaction — a former VP of marketing for Siebel and then an angel investor, Lea seems to understand what makes enterprises tick. She will be taking over the chief operating role for Thor Muller, one of the founders of the company. Muller will continue on as chief technology officer for Get Sat.

I had the opportunity to pick Lea’s brain a bit this week. She was a great sport considering she is only two weeks into the new gig. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

CRM: What’s the transition been like so far?

Lea: Fun. It’s all good. You know the success we have had on the consumer side. Mid-last year, company sign-ups have really punched there. We’ve got an average of 75 [companies] coming in a day. We have a total of 12,000 in the system. Some are long tail. Some are big, big brands. It’s a fun time for us even with all the craziness around the company. The value proposition is strong because it is about reducing costs and getting closer to the customer.

CRM: So what’s on tap next for Get Satisfaction?

Lea: The trick is finding the right feature set and price points so we can maintain a good set of self-service customers and address what I would call the high-end professional customers, which, for them, is more about integration with their own sites and with CRM systems and with the community systems that they have already purchased. They want us on the front end to create communities and push feedback through and push through their customer service solution sets.

We aren’t a whole product. There is no one whole product. Because of the economic aspect and the consumer sensitivity that we create for companies, it seems — keep in mind, I’m only on week two — that the bigger brands, in particular, that allow themselves to take part are keen to re-engage. They are not just saying “come to our site” but are listening. And for some, we are their sole customer service solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff delivered the good news to eager investors and financial analysts yesterday in his quarterly earnings call after the market closed. It was like a spring rain in a desert. For the year just ended—its 10th—Salesforce.com generated just over $1 billion in revenue, smashing its previous records, and adding 3,600 net new customers.

Ten years ago Benioff, Parker Harris, and a small group of determined San Francisco technology mavens and executives founded the company on the premise that the world ought to move to on-demand computing. While the idea was intuitively obvious to true believers, there was a great deal of doubt in the rest of the world. Skeptics complained that no one would trust their data to the emerging Internet or that an application that ran in a browser could be very powerful. Times change.

I remember very clearly the first time two people from Salesforce.com—Clarence So and former CEO John Dillon—briefed me, in February 2000. I had just started a job the prior month as a senior analyst at the old Aberdeen Group and for whatever reason I had decided to cover the emerging market of CRM and hosted delivery models.

My previous jobs had mostly been in software sales—and the first time I saw Salesforce.com’s product I not only thought, “This makes perfect sense,” but also, “Why wasn’t this available when I was selling?” It was such a clear idea, the kind of thing that I would later call a disruptive innovation.

Today Salesforce.com is the CRM market leader—if not in absolute terms, then certainly in momentum and mojo. They took on Siebel Systems in what looked like a preposterous and Quixotic adventure—and ended up eating Siebel’s lunch. Whoa!

The company has achieved a great deal in the last 10 years, making on-demand or software-as-a-service or whatever they decide to call it this week an increasingly conservative choice for new solutions, and not just for CRM. With ever-growing regularity, HR and back-office applications are now being sourced as on-demand offerings.

Nobody starts a company that builds conventional applications anymore. The economics simply don’t work. And it is so obvious that a new generation of innovators is not only building apps the on-demand way but building new business processes as well. Take Salesforce.com alumnus Tien Tzuo, who founded Zuora last year with a small cadre of friends. The vision? To deliver an on-demand billing-and-payment system for on-demand companies. It turns out that these companies have requirements not easily met by conventional billing systems. So the innovation process has started anew.

The business model took a lot of getting used to in a world where revenue charts for technology companies typically looked like blueprints for ski resorts. In a world where technology costs were high and products’ built-in obsolescence required replacement by subsequent larger investments, it was a challenge for a vendor to convince financial analysts that this way was better. Customers would respond to low total cost of ownership with loyalty. In the end the company’s momentum and happy customer base gave the financial whiz kids the encouragement to back the company’s IPO.

Steve Cakebread came on board as chief financial officer to help Salesforce.com in its successful pre-IPO courtship of the movers and shakers on Wall Street—and just a few weeks ago Cakebread left the company, perhaps to start the long process over again, this time as CFO of Xactly, an incentive management company. In yesterday’s call, Benioff graciously acknowledged Cakebread’s contributions.

There will be plenty of time later to discuss the company’s latest adventures in Cloud Computing, and to critique this or that. Today, we can savor the moment when on-demand computing hit the billion-dollar mark. Happy 10th birthday, Salesforce.com.

Denis Pombriant is the founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. His own blog can be found here, and he can be reached at denis@beagleresearch.com, or on Twitter (@denispombriant).

Salesforce.com just posted its Q4 and FY08 results, and it’s official: Marc Benioff no longer has to talk about his company’s run rate. Its annual revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2009 totaled $1.077 billion. This makes Salesforce.com the first pure SaaS business to to to surpass the billion-dollar mark. Congratulations to everybody involved.

Rather than restate their press release, I’ll link it instead. We’ll provide more complete coverage once we’ve digested it all.

My fear is that I’m about to write a rambling, semi-coherent post full of paranoid fantasies about privacy violations and evil corporations. But isn’t that what blogs are for?

Today’s bit is inspired by a New York Times article about the Deep Web, a term referring to the wealth of information stored in databases that are hidden from regular search engines. New technologies are being developed that can reach into these dark corners and mine useful and relevant data including “financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.”

I’m all for better searching, greater relevance, and more accurate predictions of what I am really looking for when I type in a search. But aren’t some of these things hidden from public view for a reason?

I’m aware that the intent of these efforts is not to expose private or classified information to unauthorized scrutiny. Still, one of my first thoughts on the topic was “keep your nose out of my business.” I’ve gotten past that, for the most part; these new engines aren’t built to snoop passwords and steal secrets, and the owner has to take reasonable steps to protect what is owned.

No, by this point I’m more concerned with practicality, relevance, and value. It’s already hard enough to find information, despite Web tech making information freely available to anybody who can use a browser—there’s a lot of clutter and misdirection that can get in the way. Opening up our options to include what the Times article calls an infinitely large haystack has the potential to create an infinite mess.

I have the feeling that digging through hidden databases is the easy part of the problem. The real trick is going to be making sense of what’s out there. Searches will trigger searches of their own, adding another layer of complexity to what goes on in the background. In addition to finding what is requested, machines will have to guess (through statistical analysis) what an inquiry is really after, get that information, and prepare to present it. Refining a search might mean throwing out all that second-level data and digging for another set, and so on until the user is done. And it all has to look simple and seamless.

Guessing right feels great, and it’s a magical experience when a person (or a machine) seems to intuit our inner thoughts based on minimal information. I still get an “oh wow” moment when I look something up on the Web and find exactly what I’m looking despite seemingly inadequate search terms. If I could send a question into the ether and get a direct answer, along with some truly relevant next steps, every time, it would be a whole new Web for me.

The possibilities are tremendous. The challenges are as well.  The company that gets it right and makes it truly useful first will have a license to print money. My ramble is over. Let the discussions begin.

I covered a product release story yesterday on Citrix Online’s newest version of GoToAssist Corporate. While that was certainly a main thrust of its overall announcement, especially since it is geared to enterprise-level users with at least 500 employees, space didn’t allow me to talk enough about an entirely new product the company unveiled: GoToAssist Express.

GoToAssist Express, according to the company, enables individual support professions to chop their travel time, lower support costs, and deliver “fast and secure online service.” There is an interesting “day pass” feature, meaning that users can provide live and unlimited technical support as needed during any 24-hour period for a fixed fee.

To me, GoToAssist Express seems aimed not only to maybe singular users, but also small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) looking to bolster service but also keep costs low. John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) wrote to me in an email that the SMB members of his organization tell him oftentimes they would like to utilize remote support technology, but that the price tag for corporate versions can get pricey and the complexity is potentially overkill for smaller organizations.

“I am extremely impressed with the new GoToAssist Express product for individuals and small businesses,” he wrote. “It has more feature depth than I expected, including a new ’safe mode’ reboot/reconnect option and support for Macs.”

He went on to write that he believes remote support to be “one of the hottest tickets in service and support technology at the moment” for a few reasons:

• results are quick and relatively easy to measure, including first contact resolution and decreased incident talk and handling time;
• the return on investment (ROI) story is compelling, as Ragsdale wrote implementations receiving full ROI for the project in the first year, and lots of case studies showing ROI in months; and
• many SSPA members are now charging extra for remote support, thereby creating a new source of services revenue.

Traditionally there have been security concerns, but Ragsdale made it clear that there are plenty of security features — and emphasis on saving money — to squash any lingering fears. “Customers are prompted to allow remote access to a single window or the whole system, and can stop the session at any time with a single click,” he wrote. “With so much emphasis on cost cutting this year, I think remote support technology will continue to find adoption, with companies investing … for the first time and [others] with older and home-grown products upgrading to gain access to new features and better security.”

For the SMBs out there, do your thoughts jibe with Ragsdale’s? Have you been using remote support strategies so far? If so, how has it been working out? If not, is it a consideration for your company now?

Avaya, a Basking Ridge, N.J.–based contact center solutions provider, has been taking steps to beef up the professional services end of its business amidst today’s economic situation driving many companies to not just add new technology, but seek guidance on how to best utilize what they already possess. I had the chance speak with Chris Formant, the president of Avaya Global Services, and get his take on how he has been helping to transform the outlet since taking over the position nine months ago. Formerly a consultant at Bearing Point (which recently filed for bankruptcy protection) and in 2006 named one of the top 25 consultants in Consulting magazine, he brings myriad experience to the position.

Read the rest of this entry »

Needless to say — MAJOR (or at least “POSSIBLE”) SPOILER ALERT AHEAD.

There’s no way yet to confirm the authenticity of the document, but several Twitterers, mainly Indian, have linked to the following letter revealing the winners of this year’s Academy Awards — the Oscars that aren’t due to be handed out until Sunday evening.

Here’s the link — again, we can’t confirm the authenticity, but I didn’t want to post the image here directly, in case you didn’t want to actually see it.

The letter purports to be from Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the Oscars.

If this is real, the world is about to go totally nuts.

This will cripple the press-release embargo system, and (obviously) pretty much kill the betting parlors, network ratings (sorry, ABC), and about any office pool you’ve been illegally participating in.

On the other hand, major news outlets are reporting that this list is a complete and utter fake of the largest order, and quote an Academy spokesperson saying the posted list is “a complete fraud.”

Guess we’ll wait and see — but from a marketing perspective, does this change anything for the companies and brands connected to Sunday’s telecast? According to published reports, ABC has already cut the price for a 30-second spot from last year’s $1.7 million to $1.4 million, and has reportedly lost several of last year’s advertisers, leading to a projection of a 21% drop in revenue compared to last year’s show. Much of that is a factor of the recession, of course — but a lack of suspense can’t possible be helpful. (The one plus for the network is that the Academy allowed it to accept movie ads — previously banned from the Oscar telecast.)

If the ratings don’t live up to expectations, will ABC have to offer makegoods to advertisers?

And will the prospect of a tawdry red carpet session studded with nominees being asked if they’ve seen “The List” make that pre-show hour the only real ratings winner?

Here’s an even better question:

If you were one of the advertisers ponying up, and that list turns out to have been real, would you feel tainted by the stigma of spoiled suspense? Would it matter?

j.

General Motors takes the cake in the early weeks of 2009, leading the way for what analysts declare to be a very painful year for sellers and buyers alike.

Combined, General Motors and Chrysler are asking for $21.6 billion dollars for a bailout. GM reports that it will not only be cutting 47,000 jobs this year, but for now, plans are in the works to phase out its Hummer, Pontiac, Saab, and Saturn brands. GM will be phasing out Saturn by 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal, or 2012, according to the New York Times. This initiative strips the once automotive giant down to four brands: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC.

Chrysler is lightening its load but still seems, at least relative to GM, to be sticking by the tagline for its Dodge brand that, ironically, embodies the mentality that likely got this member of the domestic “Big Three” into trouble — “bigger is better.”

According to reports by the WSJ, the company’s plans for survival isn’t very convincing, if only because it doesn’t seem nearly drastic enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Usama Fayyad the CEO of BI consultancy Open Insights has an impressive resume. Until recently Fayyad served as chief data officer for Yahoo! Prior to that, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company. He also lead the data mining research group at Microsoft. At today’s Predictive Analytics World conference, Fayyad took the stage and shared details about his experience with data mining and marketing, specifically at Yahoo!.

“I thought being someone who worked at Microsoft and the Internet in the early days and started an analytics firm and ran a data mining company, I should understand the Internet,” Fayyad told the crowd. “I realized [at Yahoo!] there was so much I didn’t know” What we needed at Yahoo! was data strategy, said Fayyad — strategy about how to make data a driving asset and how you can dictate new business from it.

“When I joined Yahoo!, all I understood was marketing from the top to make people aware that you have a product and trying to reinforce your brand. Then, at the bottom, is marketing before a purchase.” He relayed that essentially Yahoo!’s business comes down to targeted advertising for brand awareness and direct marketing to capture customers at the cusp of buying.

Knowing this, Fayyad began to ask, what’s in between the two? Where are the marketers when customers are in the “consideration” phase? “The zone in between is more  interesting and more profitable,” he said and went on to talk about search engine marketing and the art behind companies “bidding” on search results. Read the rest of this entry »