Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.
How to Keep (Happy) Feet on the Ground with Cloud Integration: Four Key Considerations
By: Betsy Bilhorn
Integrating data in the cloud presents represents a pivotal aspect of enabling better business decisions through access to customer data, but also serves as a challenge for many companies who lack extensive experience in the space. Scribe VP of Product Management Betsy Bilhorn walks us through important considerations when integrating data. These considerations include understanding exactly what your cloud vendor supports in their API, taking both speed and performance of an API into account, reading the fine print regarding API governors to avoid exceeding thresholds, and looking into commercial integration solution providers to reduce custom coding, time to implementation, and total cost of ownership.
Mobile CRM Apps to Grow 500% by 2014 as Market Turns With Decline in PC Shipments
By: Alex Williams (@alexwilliams)
The decline of PCs and the move to the cloud both mark dramatic shifts in the software landscape as a whole, with effects strongly touching the CRM space. Gartner Research reported that mobile CRM apps will grow 500 percent by 2014, while SaaS providers will represent more than 50 percent of CRM profits in a few years. The rise of mobile, the cloud, and SaaS continue to complement each other and open the way for both higher software profits and lower operating costs for organizations that transition to these solutions. As this shift continues, however, companies must also plan for the integration of new systems, and often must manage integrating hybrid on-premise and cloud systems to maximize their benefits and enable the best decision making based on access to business critical data.
Last Month in CRM Software – CRM News Review for March 2013
By: Richard Boardman (@CRMAdvisor)
CRM consultant Richard Boardman covers key CRM happenings from March, focusing on the CRM acquisition war between Microsoft and Salesforce. With Microsoft’s purchase of MarketingPilot and Netbreeze, the company shows that they intend to continue to fight Salesforce and other CRM contenders. In response, Salesforce’s March announcement regarding its potential $1 billion in convertible senior notes for “funding possible acquisitions of, or investments in, complementary businesses, services or technologies” shows that the two titans are far from ready to give up CRM market share.
SugarCon Speaker Reveals 10 Reasons Why Social CRM Projects Fail
By: Mark Brunelli (@Brunola88)
At Sugar CRM’s SugarCon conference, speaker David Myron enlightened his audience with a list of reasons why the high potential of social CRM often goes unrealized. Reasons he gave include the wrong organizational culture, a failure to implement compliance policy, no established focus or goals, a lack of managerial support, insufficient staffing, failure to listen or respond to customers, no influencer plan, and inadequate reporting. As others in the industry have mentioned, an additional major reason “social” CRM fails is because it’s treated as its own entity – social CRM is CRM, and successful companies will create a CRM plan with social incorporated into the core structure.
Gartner: CIOs and CMOs Must ‘Turn Sparks Into Flame’
By: Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman)
Michael’s video interview with Gartner VP Mark McDonald casts much needed perspective on the importance of a partnership between the CMO and CIO. With marketing tech spending forecasted to surpass that of IT by 2016, the two departments have struggled to understand their new dynamic. As Mark succinctly puts it: “Turning sparks into flame and growing that flame requires a scalable, sustainable platform. That’s what the CIO brings to the table. The most powerful combinations we’ve seen are the CIO and CMO working together with a shared goal to grow the business. When my goal is to grow the business, everybody has the potential to win. When my goal is to control costs, there is automatically a system of winners and losers.”
We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.
