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
   

Identifying solutions to the key business and technology challenges   At Tomtom Consultants, we have extensive knowledge of vendors and products in the Sales, Marketing and Client Services area. Rather than provide a long list of all vendors that we’ve seen, heard of or encountered, we prefer to identify, understand and add value to partners that we see as market leading. . At Tomtom Consultants we maintain and monitor a full view of vendors, solutions and products. Whether a result of recent engagements or our regular market assessments, we can accelerate your understanding and identification of appropriate solutions in the marketplace.

► Client Communications and Reporting

► CRM and Salesforce Automation

► New Business and Proposal Management

► Marketing Automation

Client Communications and Reporting

	DeskNet Inc. is the leading provider of software solutions for Enterprise Customer Communications. DeskNet’s ContentWelder is a powerful and easy-to-use platform that has been used to deliver proven solutions in areas such as 1-to-1 customer communications and automated compliance workflow. .
	FundWorks is a specialist provider of client communications solutions for the investment community. FundWorks was founded in 2003 by a team of senior industry consultants and managers. FundWorks management team has over 9 years’ average experience in the asset management sector, previously holding senior positions in operations, sales and marketing, project management and IT. The company currently employs 40 staff and is headquartered in the City of London, with support and development offices in Glasgow and Nagpur, India.
	Client Reporting Software Specialists for Asset Management companies. Vermilion Software is an independent software house located in London, England. We are dedicated to developing business excellence through the continued development, implementation, training and support of the Vermilion Reporting Suite (a best of breed client reporting software solution) and Data-Gateway Service (a web-based data gateway / middleware solution) software products.

.CRM and Salesforce Automation

	Onyx Software Corporation is a worldwide leader in CRM, Customer Process and Customer Performance solutions for the enterprise. Onyx provides flexible CRM solutions that enable organizations to automate, manage, and evolve their customer processes quickly and cost-effectively for strategic advantage. By providing an integrated suite of customer process automation applications encompassing customer relationship management, process management, and analytics capabilities, Onyx enables enterprises to reduce costs, increase productivity and grow revenue.
	Pivotal CRM is the customer relationship management (CRM) product suite of CDC Software, The Customer-Driven Company. CDC Software is a provider of enterprise software applications designed to help organizations deliver a superior customer experience while increasing efficiencies and profitability. The CDC Software product suite includes Pivotal CRM (customer relationship management); c360 CRM add-on products, industry solutions, and development tools for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform; Ross ERP (enterprise resource planning) and SCM (supply chain management); MVI real-time performance management; IMI warehouse management and order management; and Platinum China HR (human resource) and business analytics solutions.
	Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to salesforce.com than any other CRM company in the world.
	Satuit Technologies, Inc. is a global leader in On-Demand and On-Premise vertical market sales force automation (SFA) and client relationship management (CRM) solutions that are easy to implement and provide  clients with the precise tools they need to increase sales, better serve their clients, master information-intensive business relationships, and cut costs.

 New Business and Proposal Management

	Kadient helps you improve sales performance by arming your team with the content, messages, and strategies they need to win at every stage of your customers’ buying cycle. Using Kadient’s on-demand sales knowledge application, inciteKnowledge, sales people can sell on value, stand out from the crowd, provide sales coaching, and accelerate their sales cycle. Marketing teams gain more control and consistency in the messages delivered to the marketplace and have greater impact on revenue.
	Proposal Software is the world’s leading proposal technology company, offering support to the proposal professional with ‘best in class’ tools that reflect ‘best industry practices’. The driving force behind our organization is helping proposal professionals achieve superior work group productivity. The underlying architecture and search engine technologies of our solutions mirror today’s most advance database techniques, while Microsoft Office compatibility interfaces ensure immediate user orientation and acceptance.
	The Sant Corporation is a provider of proven software and expertise that improves sales effectiveness. We help companies who provide value-based solutions win more business by accelerating the production of persuasive proposals, RFP responses, presentations, and related documents. Businesses choose Sant to improve productivity, increase sales, and develop accurate, consistent sales documents for their customers.

Marketing Automation

	Eloqua gives you the power to create, execute and monitor powerful multi-channel, multi-touch demand generation campaigns. Automatically score and profile each lead. Deliver only qualified prospects to sales. Show marketing results and drive more revenue.
	ExactTarget offers financial service organisations a single user interface to define, modify, and send one-to-one communications in response to their constituents’ needs
	smartFOCUS DIGITAL, a leader in email and digital marketing, makes it easy to turn every online communication into a powerful business generation tool. Our on-demand software Email Reaction, enables marketers to more effectively deliver relevant personalised and timely communications that inspire customer relationships and improve results.

Transforming Investment Management Sales, Marketing and Client Services   Based on a detailed vision and previous experience of transformation projects, we provide specialist services to support any Investment Manager seeking to:   improve their Client Communications, Reporting, CRM, Contact Management, Fund and Marketing communciations processes and offerings transform their Distribution firm through technology, process and organisation-enabled change programmes establish a shared, centralised Sales, Marketing and Client Services platform that enables global, multi-product, multi-channel support

For many years, Investment Management has underinvested in it’s Distribution capabilities. The challenges of selling, marketing and servicing in an increasingly complex market have been accentuated by an environment of manual processes, tactical systems and unstructured organisations. . We are now seeing increasing activity to alleviate this situation. Our services assist Investment Managers to enable this change through:

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• a technology vision that develops a Distribution Platform for Investment Managers and Financial Service companies

• process design, re-engineering and change management

• structural organisation change to take advantage of specialist and centralisation

Specialised support packages

Tomtom Consultants has assisted a number of companies with their initial CRM projects, enabling both the technology and  processes that result in success for the business.  Once up-and-running our clients are able to support the majority of ongoing needs internally.  However, a regular programme of external support, education and development often helps keep CRM in the shape that the business needs it.  At present, we provide support packages focused around the following business areas:

• CRM for Financial Services SalesForce Automation; more details are in the brochure here

• Client Communications for Institutional Investment Management

• New Business Management for Financial Services

• Client Service and Support for Institutional and Corporate channels