Brian Giese's Blog

What is PaaS?

Salesforce.com announced at their Dreamforce Developers Conference last week the industry’s first platform as a service (PaaS) they call Force.com. With the Force.com platform, you can build any application, any database, any logic, and run it all on demand on a secure infrastructure. Now salesforce.com customers can create and run any application and even any user interface using Force.com. Here's a video of the Force.com announcement delivered by Mark Benioff, CEO.

Marketer of the Year Awards

Eloqua, the on-demand application platform for B2B marketers, announced thier awards for the best business-to-business marketers at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week.  Here are the winners:

The Marketing Innovation Award – Postini

The Best Lead Management Award – Cognos

The Best Lead Scoring Award – InQuira

The Global Marketing Effectiveness Award – Sybase

The Interactive Marketing Award – Kofax

The Marketing Visionary Award – Angela Kauffman, Aon

The Marketer’s Choice Award – NetQos

Should you have a hosted or in-house CRM?

The first step to fully realizing the benefits of a CRM is conducting a careful evaluation of your business needs. Factors such as budget, user-base, company size, and customer needs will determine whether a fully integrated, enterprise-level CRM solution or a hosted CRM solution will better fit the needs of your company.

For small or midmarket companies, a hosted CRM solution is attractive because it enables organizations access to best-of-breed technology at a cost-effective price, allowing the companies to stay focused on their core businesses, rather than on their software applications. For enterprise companies integrations to the supply-chain and back office are important.

Here are some things to consider when choosing the right CRM solution:

The Ability of the User Population:
One of the biggest challenges with any CRM deployment, including hosted offerings, is getting salespeople to actually use the product. Most hosted CRM solutions are browser-based, and familiar to the user base, making adoption much easier and the learning curve shorter. A real benefit with a hosted solution is that training can be conducted in a matter of hours, rather than days.

Length/Speed of Deployment:
The average deployment of an in-house CRM solution is between three to nine months, whereas the average deployment of a hosted CRM solution is a few weeks (in some cases users can start using the service in real time as soon as they sign up). With a hosted CRM solution the infrastructure is available immediately. There is no hardware or server software to install and maintain, ensuring fast deployment and worry-free maintenance. This gives the IT department the necessary time to configure the product to fit your business. The speed of deployment of a hosted CRM solution speaks any company that is concerned with keeping costs down, while making the best technological investments for its needs.

Your Budget:
The purpose of a hosted CRM solution is its ability to bring affordable access to brand name applications at a fraction of the cost and with all the functionality of an in-house solution. The beauty of some hosted CRM solutions is that they have been built to work in either a hosted or an in-house environment. A company looking to initially invest in a hosted solution is able to enjoy the functionality of an in-house solution with the ability to bring the solution in-house in the future. If you're looking for a large-scale CRM deployment, but don't have the IT budget to sustain it, a hosted CRM solution is what you need. Available with low, predictable monthly fees, a hosted CRM solution eliminates large capital outlays and unpredictable IT expenses; simple pricing makes it easy to budget and affordable for every business.

Your Company's IT Strategy:
If you are looking for a solution that easily integrates with your back-office and third-party applications as part of a strategy to integrate your applications across the organization, a hosted CRM solution is the choice for you. The value proposition of a hosted CRM solution is its ability to expand the available information to the entire organization, including through integration with other applications. The ability to integrate with mobile phones, for example, provides salespeople with the necessary tool they need when they're on the road. This ability may be the deciding factor for an organization that needs a mobile CRM solution that is both flexible and easy to use.

Take a look at these apps for more information...Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Eloqua, Rightnow, SugarCRM, and OracleOnDemand