Inspired? No » crm

CRM On-Demand Is In Demand

Espen Antonsen — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 15:00:00 +0000

CRM Blog has a nice post about why on-demand CRM popularity is increasing. Sidney C. Lejfer lists up the following main points:

Replacement of large Software Purchase with a monthly subscription charge

Flexible Pricing, Licensing, and Scalability

Decrease in Hardware Requirements and Support

Decrease in IT Support Staff

Elimination of Costly Upgrade Charges

Remote Management

Faster and Easier Deployment

Good Solution for Distributed Offices

General ease of use

Availability of Good Mobile Solutions

Security and Backup Services

On-line Training

Significant Third Party Add-ons and Web Services

Integration Capabilities

The end of the beginning: SaaS starts walking upright

Espen Antonsen — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:50:00 +0000

Interesting article about Software As a Service (SaaS) by by Cliff Reeves (Microsoft Emerging Business Team):
The end of the beginning: SaaS starts walking upright.

Don’t you just love it when another hype cycle settles down? Is SaaS evolving from pure web-based access to client-server? Is it evolving from purely hosted environments to include enterprise server deployments? Will we finally stop hearing:

* “we are implementing everything on the web with thin clients. No desktop deployments!”
* “It’s all On Demand, baby, no servers required!”

It appears so, and the evolution appears inevitable, driven by three forces:

1. Revenue, because users matter, and browser access penalizes power users
2. Lower training costs and higher adoption rates when using familar tools
3. Legacy Integration and customization

Interesting post. I don’t fully agree with everything though. But mainly because of a different focus. 24SevenOffice do not focus on the enterprise market.

Cliff says that SaaS providers Salesforce.com and Siebel offers client software in addition to the web access. We have 24SevenSync which is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook which lets users synchronize data between 24SevenOffice and Outlook.

He states that browsers don’t offer the same user experience as local software. Im not going discuss further on that but I would like say that we have solved a lot issues with user interface and speed. See my article about our CRM module. We use the Ajax technique extensively.

I agree with his point on using familiar tools. That is why we have designed 24SevenOffice to appear as a Windows application and not as a normal webpage.

Technorati: CRM, SaaS, Ajax, 24SevenOffice, Salesforce.com.

Oracle buys PeopleSoft

Espen Antonsen — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 12:45:00 +0000

Well after a long battle Oracle has finally taken over PeopleSoft. Will be interesting to see how this turns out. I must say I am very negative to mergers and corporate acqusistions of this size. The HP/Compaq merger is good example of how hard it is to combine two different corporate cultures, strategies and to achieve synergies and cost-cuttings from this. A motive can off course be ‘if you can’t beat them – buy them’. Bad for competition, customers and the remaining competitors.

Acquisitions of this type in the ERP/CRM market is by no means a surprise. It has been happening for a while (i.e. Microsoft overtake of Navision) and is very much expected to continune, in fact it’s required with the large number of players in the market and many of them with very poor financial results.

PeopleSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: PSFT) today announced that following discussions throughout the weekend, the Board of Directors, based upon the recommendation of the Transaction Committee of independent directors, has approved a definitive merger agreement under which a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) will acquire all PeopleSoft shares for $26.50 per share in cash. The total value of the transaction is approximately $10.3 billion.