Aberdeen: CRM To Lead SMB Enterprise Software Spending
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Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) still view cost-cutting as their primary reason for making enterprise software purchases. But customer acquisition and retention ranks second, and for that reason they will spend more on CRM functionality than any other enterprise software area this year, according to data gathered by Aberdeen Research.
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SEPTEMBER 08, 2004  - Open-source software start-up SugarCRM Inc. will release the first commercial enterprise version of its Linux-based open-source CRM application tomorrow, starting at $149 per seat for the first year.
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com September 30, 2004, 8:02 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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com September 14, 2004, 2:26 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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Automating the sales process is one of the most important functions of a CRM system. In fact, much of today's CRM software has its origins back in the mid-'80s and early '90s, not as "customer relationship management" software, but instead as "sales automation" software.
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In Part 1 of this series,  Gartner research director Scott Nelson made the case that the decision to buy a CRM application involves much more than price, implementation costs and strategic goals of the company.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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(InfoWorld) - SMBs in North America expect to increase their IT spending by an average of only 2 percent this year after boosting spending 8 percent in 2006, according to a Forrester Research survey. The survey of about 1,200 businesses with six to 999 employees released Tuesday showed that 62 percent of them have an optimistic outlook for their companies this year, up from 46 percent in a 2006 survey, but that doesn't translate into significantly more IT spending, said analyst Michael Speyer. "Last year's spending increased fairly robustly. The ... market is telling us now, 'Guess what? We're going to keep it steady now,'" Speyer said. IT spending will focus on new hardware purchases and added personnel. Hardware spending is expected to focus on replacing or upgrading servers and the regularly scheduled replacement of about 25 to 30 percent of companies' desktops and workstations. Software purchases will be mostly of network security and Web application products. Twenty percent of IT managers surveyed said improving the efficiency of their IT systems is a top priority, and 33 percent of them are focused on measuring the impact of their IT spending on business performance. Although virtualization is a big trend in IT, SMBs are less focused on it than are large enterprises, Speyer said. Virtualization, which, among other things, makes it easier to run multiple software applications simultaneously on one physical server, enables a company to consolidate the number of servers it operates. But SMBs are less likely to use virtualization for server consolidation because the potential savings are not as great as in enterprises. "If you look at a typical midmarket company, anything from 12 to 17 servers, there's not a whole lot of hardware there. Where server consolidation plays out is in the enterprise space where you have hundreds of servers," he said. Although SMBs may do some server consolidation, they may still buy some new servers for disaster recovery and security purposes and to run new software applications, the survey said. And although new technology is supposed to increase automation, SMBs will devote 29 percent of their IT budgets to full-time IT staff, the highest of any spending category, including hardware, software, and networking equipment. As IT systems grow, they get more difficult to manage, but SMBs don't have the in-house staff to manage systems as an enterprise does, Speyer said. So while they may have to hire more full-time employees or part-time contractors, they may also turn to system integrators or value-added resellers to take over some management functions. IT spending also varied by industry sector. Spending is expected to rise most steeply in the telecommunications sector (7 percent), business services (5 percent), and finance and insurance (3.4 percent). It is expected to decline in the manufacturing sector (-0.6 percent) and the media, entertainment, and leisure sector (-0.9 percent).
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com October 4, 2004, 9:13 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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InfoWorld - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. and Lawson Software Inc. are expanding their existing relationship to jointly target small and midsize business (SMB) users, initially in North America and three specific industries. All applications vendors, including Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, see the SMB market as a huge source of future revenue and each company is coming up with ways to hone in on that sector which, unlike the enterprise applications space, lacks clear market leaders. Under an agreement announced Thursday, IBM will be able to resell Lawson's S3 and M3 applications in North America, and will be involved in the development of the software for users in the financial services, fashion and food and beverage industries. Lawson will collaborate with consultants from IBM Global Business Services and the vendor's hardware, software and sales staff to come up with ways to solve business and technology issues specific to those vertical sectors. The agreement builds on an existing relationship between the two firms centered around helping users adopt SOA (service-oriented architecture). "This has been a long time coming," said Harry Debes, president and CEO of Lawson. "We've been talking for IBM for almost a year." Despite adding additional sales staff at a rate of 50 to 60 hires planned for this year, Lawson found itself unable to go after as many SMB users as it would like. "The IBM relationship will dramatically increase our reach," he added. Like IBM, Lawson defines SMB users as companies with annual revenues of between US$100 million and several billion dollars. IBM has previously resold Lawson software outside North America, notably the M3 applications Lawson gained from its 2006 $480 million purchase of Intentia, but on a very ad hoc basis, according to Debes. "There was no formal agreement around it," he said. "We've crafted this agreement so it could become the basis of a global agreement." The plan is to see how the relationship with IBM works in North America over the course of the next 12 months and then determine whether to widen its scope to other countries and other industries. "We wanted to walk before we can run," Debes said. He reassured Lawson's resellers elsewhere in the world that any future moves within IBM would take place taking into account existing partnerships. "At the same time, we don't want to become overly dependent on one channel for revenue," he added. The other industry sectors Lawson focuses on are health care, retail, government and education, manufacturing, wholesale distribution and service and rental. IBM and Lawson already have around 3,000 joint customers, but Debes said, "There wasn't very much togetherness" about how those sales were achieved. He's hopeful the new formalized relationship will result in significant new business for Lawson. Debes isn't worried about the continued speculation that IBM might re-enter the applications market, which it quit in 1999. "It doesn't keep me up at night," he said. "I firmly believe they will be in the apps space. They're not pretending to be in the ERP space, they already are." He pointed to IBM Italy's recent acquisition of several ERP companies. "They're smack dab in the middle of the ERP market. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when," he added. "If theyâre wise, theyâll look to do partnerships with Lawson, if theyâre foolish, theyâll do SMB partnerships with SAP." Â
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(InfoWorld) - As large enterprises embrace the concept of virtualization to more efficiently manage their information technology systems, vendors are now targeting the small-to-medium size market. VMwareÂ on Monday is introducing a new low-cost service plan to give small-to-medium businesses (SMB) a taste of what virtualization can do for them. It's entry level bundle includes a free download of the VMware Server software for virtualizing servers and a $1,500 support plan called Virtual Center. Although less than the $5,000 support program for enterprise customers, the $1,500 support plan is limited to three two-socket physical servers that could be converted into multiple virtual servers. If an SMB customer wants to virtualize more servers, the support would cost an extra $400 for each extra server. Virtualization refers to the practice of managing a data center holistically to make the best use of the hardware available, reduce the capital cost of new servers and the operational cost of electricity to run them. Virtualization software like VMware Server makes it possible for one server to run multiple software applications at the same time. VMware sees growth potential in the SMB market, given that 70 percent of 1.2 million downloads of the free VMware Server software since June 2006 have been to SMB customers, said Ben Matheson, vice president of product management for VMware, a division of storage vendor EMC. He defines small-to-medium businesses as those with fewer than 1,000 employees or an average of 100 physical servers in their businesses. "There is a lot of market awareness of the value of virtualization in the enterprise...but we think it's useful for all companies," said Matheson. He anticipates many of the SMBs downloading the free VMware Server are just taking virtualization out for a test drive. "There are definitely a lot of trials, getting it into their labs and using things like virtual appliances and testing them. But there is also quite a bit of production use," he said. Server vendors have also been making overtures to the SMB market. Hewlett-Packard began offeringÂ a Virtualization Assessment Service on Feb. 1 to analyze an IT infrastructure to see how it might benefit from virtualization. The service is being offered through HP's resellers who typically serve its SMB customers, while HP's own sales and engineering force tends to large enterprise customers. IBM even calls its initiative a "Virtualization Test Drive." IBM launched in 2006 a virtualization education and sales initiative targeted at SMBs. IBM said that more than 65 percent of their virtualization sales are driven by IBM partners targeting SMBs.
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Vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can expect their market to become more buoyant as companies ponder purchasing new systems or boosting the functionality of existing ones, according to ...
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Ziff Davis - Microsoft CRM leans on partners to fill functionality gaps.
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For years, companies large and small have been convinced that if they want the sophisticated functionality of enterprise-class software like ERP and CRM systems, they must buy pre-packaged applications. And, to a large extent, that remains true.
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InfoWorld - NetSuite, the other hosted CRM company, laid out version 2007.0 this week of its CRM, ERP, and PRM (partner relationship management) SaaS (software as a service) solution.
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Targeted mainly at its VAR (Value Added Reseller) channel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Version 4.0 was released to manufacturing this week.Version 4.0, code-named Titan, will be available in several versions: an on-premises application, a partner or VAR-hosted version plus a version of Dynamics hosted by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, the Microsoft-hosted deployment.All versions will share a single code base and the hosted versions use a multi-tenant architecture.Addressing its new upgrade message to its VAR channel, Microsoft officials said Version 4.0 includes an upgraded version of multi-tenant that will support multiple customers per server.Other upgrades include a choice of 25 languages and support for multiple currencies and embedded BI capabilities, including an ad hoc reporting wizard that will allow nontechnical users to create custom reports.Version 4.0 will also integrate with Microsoft?s unified communications platform, Microsoft Office Communications Server, along with its presence and location features.Although Microsoft will offer to host a version on its Live platform, the channel is the backbone of its strategy, according to most industry analysts.Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting said that the Microsoft channel is so strong in the SMB market that it is the envy of all the other software vendors.?Everyone is trying to steal Microsoft channel partners. If you are an enterprise ISV there is no better and more mature channel than Microsoft,? Greenbaum said.Microsoft and Novell have the two oldest legacy channels in the industry, and Greenbaum called them, ?the nuts and bolts wizards.?In a prepared statement, Microsoft said it relies on its strong network of partner companies to bring technology to customers in the SMB marketplace, claiming over 400,000 partners.Dynamics CRM 4.0 is expected to be available in the first quarter.