RSSCRM On-Demand Market ….Just got HOT!
SAP made its long-awaited dive into the hosted, subscription CRM (customer relationship management) "on demand" market on 02 Feb. The $75 per user system carries a 100-user minimum, restricting its potential customers to the enterprise clients SAP traditionally targets.
SAP's service, called SAP CRM on-demand solution, focuses on sales force automation functionality. Basic customer service and marketing tools will be released later in the year. The hosted, Web-based system is aimed at allowing customers to rapidly roll out CRM functionality to new users and departments. English and German versions of the software are now available, with French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese versions slated to follow within the next three months.
IBM is SAP's hosting services provider and will run the service's data centers, and will also offer its consulting services to SAP's customers. Although the two companies are close partners, SAP alone will sell the new system. SAP is guaranteeing 99.5 percent uptime, with higher SLAs (service level agreements) available to customers interested in paying for higher-tier services, according to Bob Stutz, SAP's senior vice president of CRM product and global strategy.
Comments from IDC blog:
It's going to take several months for SAP to roll out the full CRM suite (including customer service and marketing tools), and the SAP offering is marginally more expensive than that of Salesforce and Siebel/Oracle. It will be interesting to see how proactive SAP is in pushing the new offering: will it – as it does in its traditional software business – drive aggressively for market share leadership in the SaaS space, or will it hold back to avoid undermining its traditional CRM offering? If SAP holds back, it risks badly damaging its standing in this expanding model of software (and business service) delivery.
Source: InforworldPrashanth RaiTag(s):SaaS, CRM, SAP
On-Demand – Not the cure-all some think.
On-Demand software and services have the potential of changing the way software is used and implemented. I believe in this fact so much that I founded and am now the CEO of InsideSales.com, a provider of an on-demand CRM application with integrated dialers and telephony tools. Despite all of the advantages that come with on-demand solutions, on-demand software faces one of the same major challenges as does premise based solutions – executive driven implementations.
What I mean by this, is that unless an implementation of a CRM application (or almost any new software implementation) is dictated, driven and defined from the executive level of an organization, it is likely to fail. Why is this? – No software will fit your needs exactly (neither premise based nor on-demand). When this happens (and it always will), the only way to save an implementation is to work around the problem. There are usually ways to make a solution do what you want, just not necessarily the way you want it to do it. However, at this same point, the person who just selected the produce or service is looking like they made a mistake. What’s more, these issues in the software will often become the scapegoat for employee underperformance. At this point, the organization will usually either fight the product of service and not accept a different way if doing things for a while then scrap it, or just scrap the implementation at that point.
The solution for this is to have complete buy off of the product or service from the executive level of the organization. This will convey to the company that a persons job is not at risk for having selected the ‘wrong’ solution, and that will send the message to the employees that the product or solution will not be an accepted excuse for underperformance.
What I am saying is nothing new. However, there is sometimes a cloud of excitement around the ‘on-demand’ solutions; though they do offer to make many things to make an implementation go more smoothly. They are not the fix to all implementation problems.
On demand solution are not impervious to all the problems premise based solutions experience.
i think the point you are making is an important one that whichever application on premise / on demand the implementation hassles continue to exist.
But again the whole point of on demand is reduced complexity in implementation …what are your thoughts on this?
Also you in the comment have mentioned the need for executive team support, but in the on demand space there has been a lot of positioning talking about how dept/business units can just go ahead and start off using on demand solution not having to go the enterprise route…what are your thoughts on the same?