Salesforce.com have provided a release preview and full notes for the Summer 09 release. Some interesting points to note. Our views below, please feel free to comment and discuss if we’ve missed anything:
It’s that time again. saleforce.com have added the ‘Coming in Summer 09′ tag and we’re looking through for the features we want and wondering where the ones we really need have gone to - multiple contacts on a single event, need we say more.
Updated 07/04/09: Looks like there is a UK alternative. Ribbit provided by BT. Interesting to see how BT push it, and great to see the capability make it to Europe.
We were just alerted to Jott based on its recent release of Jott for Salesforce service, www.jott.com. However, the following seems relevant to any CRM implementation. It could be the solution to the most common issue stopping 100% adoption of CRM solutions. Put simply it allows users to dictate notes to a telephone answering service, which then converts the message to text and adds the record to salesforce.com.
salesforce.com made a free version of their Mobile application available this week to Professional and Enterprise license users that haven’t got full Mobile licenses. It’s simple to configure on the salesforce.com side but may need the usual Blackberry device installation hoops to be jumped through. It’s also available on iPhone and Windows Mobile. Find out more at http://www.salesforce.com/mobile/lite/
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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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.
