Please note - this survey is now closed.

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It looks like 2009 will be the year that Investment Managers begin to make the most of Email Marketing capabilities.

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As has been widely announced today, Jupiter Asset Management has gone live with Institutional Client Reporting provided by Vermilion Software.  The selection was announced in on Feb 29th, 2008.  So that’s six or seven months to implement, give or take some delivery and PR wriggle-room.

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Matt Asay recently posted some commentary on the benefits of Software-as-a-Service and Open Source technology in a business downturn.  As usual Matt draws useful conclusions on how IT groups might react over the coming months (and years!).

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Fundworks have announced that Schroders in Singapore has selected to use their Client Reporting solution.  This follows on from the decision in May by Schroders UK to select the Fundworks Client Reporting solution.

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salesforce.com is about to undergo the third release of the year (or the first release of next year if you go by the branding) - Winter ‘09.  One of the key points of difference for salesforce.com in our experience is the value it adds "for free" with it’s regular release schedule.  This is a much easier upgrade process than your traditional software where business users have to fight for, queue and pay for the IT department to apply upgrades.

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The business challenge

We’re undertaking a vendor selection for a client seeking a Marketing Automation and Email Marketing solution.  They want to introduce efficiencies into an already very busy Marketing department while improving the service that they provide to the wider Sales and Servicing communities.

Potential vendors

Based upon an initial criteria of integration with salesforce.com CRM, the shortlist comprises the following:

All of these vendors have some integration with salesforce.com and Investment Management experience.  However, this is a very immature software category in the Investment Management industry.  The salesforce.com integration is a key factor so there are no other vendors in play at present.  However as the industry and software matures, maybe there are some emerging solutions that need to be considered in future.

A wider net

So has anyone experience with other Marketing Automation vendors?  Are there some that don’t currently integrate with salesforce.com but are a strong enough proposition to be considered in isolation? We welcome all suggestions and comments.  In return, we’ll happily share our experience of Marketing Automation within the Investment Management industry with you.

While the SaaS CRM market in Financial Services has been dominated by Salesforce.com for the past few years, recent entrant has to be considered a threat to this dominance.  While Netsuite and RightNow have been beaten off, the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM online offering – crm.dynamics.com – creates a new alternative that must have the pepped up the Benioff team.

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Microsoft CRM has been an on-site offering for a while and VARs have provided hosted versions as ‘competitors’ to the salesforce.com offering.  However, in Financial Services we’ve seen little headway made by the On-Site offering and the leverage provided by the SaaS community around salesforce.com and it’s new Cloud Computing offering, force.com has increasingly steamrollered the hosted approach – not just for Microsoft but for all ASP providers.

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In general, when carrying out vendor selection or market research projects, our experience is that firms select Microsoft when budget is tight or when the “We’re a Microsoft house” badge carries sufficient weight that IT overrule any other factors.

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However, the release of an SaaS offering, albeit from the same software family, has to be considered separately from the legacy offering.  It’s now in the land of the application alongside salesforce.com, Google docs, eBay, Facebook and the rest.  It will be interesting to see how it fares.  On first glance, our analysis draws the following initial conclusions on the Microsoft CRM Online solution.

+ves

• SasS offering is now available
• Weight of Microsoft marketing and budget behind it – business users are bound to see some advertising if Microsoft throw their dollars behind it
• 99.9% of companies have a relationship with Microsoft – Linux desktop or OpenOffice are yet to make that big a dent
• While it’s not IBM, most IT departments are comfortable with buying Microsoft

-ves

• Change the name – it’s too long and doesn’t make it clear what it does.  It tells us what it is, but to the business user it falls behind salesforce.com in terms of who uses it and how.
• VAR-led distribution > the ability to execute depends upon the quality of the VAR not Microsoft, and there are a lot of VARs with little or no CRM experience in the network
• Little penetration of the Investment Management market
• Development resources required for onsite application
• SaaS is very new
• Microsoft limited track record of providing Enterprise-level applications