I just got back from what seems like much more than a two week road trip. Met a lot of great customers and partners, and had some very insigthful conversations along the way.
I gave a talk about multi-tenancy and vendor lock-in at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam in Friday. I wasn’t sure how well a VERY open source-minded crowd would react to a SaaS talk - since SaaS apps tend to obviate the concept of pure open source software. But the attendees were very receptive and ears pricked up at the concept of Multi-Instance architectures and what Data Center Edition means from a software development, deployment and management perspective.
One of our partners, OutDare, has made a very cool Sugar integration that will make call center management and optimization on the Sugar platform an easy and way cool scenario. I don’t want to give too much away, as it is still in development, but it was really cool to see.
But going from a conference like Holland Open to the (perhaps ironically in this case) titled Oracle OpenWorld conference will be an interesting change. Really a night and day situation here. I have been to many, many Oracle conferences and they do put on a good show. But it is impressive to see some really wild tech innovation at such a smaller show as the Holland Open.
All in all, between the London Acceleration and the great interactions at the Amsterdam event and with our partners and customers in Europe in general, it is safe to say that the European arm of the Sugar Universe is thriving.
There’s been an additional fallout to all the recent news surrounding the collapse of Wall Street that I believe many have been missing. Besides being some of America’s oldest and most storied financial institutions, companies such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were also technological innovators in the world of IT, including open source.
Matt Asay commented the other day on Merrill Lynch, which has relied heavily on open source as a key enabler of its core business applications. But with its purchase by Bank of America, what will happen to all that great open source ingenuity? It’ll be interesting to see if Bank of America gives any of those contributions back to the community, which Merrill rarely did. And as Asay points out, does the purchase of open source projects by an outside party constitute distribution?
Merrill Lynch aside, Lehman Brothers’ CTO Hari Gopalkrishnan was highly regarded as one of the most innovative IT leaders within his respective industry. Lehman was one of the first to leverage grid computing, open source, and SOA to create a governance framework to manage real-time data distribution, access, and usage…in short, what the Gartner’s of the world have talked about but rarely seen executed in the real world.
As any vendor will testify to, the real innovation and advancement takes place not in Silicon Valley, but by the customers that implement and apply business applications in real-world scenarios. It would be a crime to see such work done in recent years fall to the wayside as a result of the credit crunch.
In Amsterdam finalizing my speech I’m giving at Holland Open Conference this week. But looking back over yesterday, the CRM Acceleration London event was fantastic…really amazing turnout and our biggest event yet (anyone seeing a trend here?).
The attendees had great questions and some side conversations were really interesting, with prospects and users seeking unique solutions to their customer-facing and partner-facing issues that only the felxibility of a product like SugarCRM, coupled with the imagination of our customers and partners could address.
Special recognition to Thomas Lundquist of Optaros…he stepped in VERY last minute and gave a great customer case study - much appreciated. In fact, all of the partner and customer presentations were awesome.
I can’t wait for Chicago, Munich and San Francisco!
Wow…what a busy week, as can be evidenced by my absence at Outsiders…the last few days here in London were spent with different SugarCRM partners of different levels…and they all had a lot of great insights into applications, where Sugar can see even more opportunity, etc.
From the big guys like BT, to the regional integrators, these are all super smart, insightful individuals that really get what Sugar represents in the CRM space - and to a greater extent the application/platform space…
More important - these guys fit in so well with the SugarCRM culture…they are fun, cool and get that we can have a good time changing the software world for the better. Special kudos to Tau Space, Optaros, Q Industries and Red Pill - a great bunch of minds in the extended Sugar family.
Tomorrow is the big CRM Acceleration London event, and I think this will be our biggest yet. Very excited to see all the great prospects registered to attend, and give my presentation in (eeep!) a little under 8 hours! I can’t sleep and have been emailing with partners…this exchange has been so useful. Really glad to have connected with these guys.
So all I’ve been reading about recently is what appears to be the end of the world as I know it….Wall Street and the economy is collapsing on the credit crunch, technology CEO’s are predicting the end of SaaS, and cloud computing is toast. Truly positive times, positive thinking.
Lawson’s CEO spoke along these lines so confidently, and foolhardy, a few weeks ago in the context of SaaS. Others have commented as well on cloud computing. But it seems to me that the truth and future, as always, falls somewhere in the middle. SaaS isn’t dying as so much as I believe it’s simply plateaued. Everybody is aware of it and people have heeded its pros and cons.
SaaS will continue to survive because of its appeal to customers and because it’s broken the mold offered by the on-premise model. Hence the SaaS model will continue to succeed because it offers the customer choice. But it’s these same forces that will dictate that the ability to be hybrid, either SaaS or on-premise, will win out in the long-run. Customers should have the choice to deploy their mission-critical apps when they want and in a manner in which their business model dictates how they want it.
Choice is about the ability to customize an application to fit a specific business model. Choice is about having direct control over the data and processes when the time calls for it. For all these reasons and more, SaaS is and never will be the end-all, be-all deployment model.
I read an article this morning by Bruce Byfield on itmanagement.com outlining some of the commonly-held myths pertaining to open source. Besides being a well-written summary of what many of our proprietary-based competitors throw at us, the article resonated with me due to a conversation I had this weekend with relatives at a family get-together, during which I had the dubious task of explaining what SugarCRM does and what open source means.
But an impression was made, because despite my audiences’ lack of software expertise, they quickly picked up on the notions by associating open source with recent mainstream announcements, such as Wal-Mart’s decision to sell PCs loaded with open source alternatives for $300 and less or telecom companies, such as Verizon, opening up their cell phone platforms to developers. Even those relatives and friends that were a little more tech-savvy understood many of the advantages associated with the open source model.
The points made by Byfield underscore the conversation I had with relatives. Open source is becoming a commonly-accepted, mainstream notion, and with it, myths such as these will become part of folklore.
There’s been a big focus at this conference regarding Web 2.0 and social networking, and the resulting fallout it could have on CRM. As Martin mentioned in his previous post, much of it seems to be a lot of hype with very few companies actually leveraging the solutions practically in terms of CRM.
That said, conversations with a number of attendees and a few Gartner analysts have shown some real progress being made in viral marketing, thanks largely to the evolution that the Web has made in the past 10+ years. Whereas the concept of importing sales leads or building networks for a sales force via Facebook is still very much a theory, viral marketing is legit, and appears to be the only pillar of CRM that’s truly leveraged Web 2.0 to the tune of more customers and increased revenue.
Years ago, companies built Web sites and then attempted to drive consumers to it via banner ads and keyword searches. Today, it’s now possible to construct a Web site that works similar to an application, molding the site’s content and format to allow it to mold to different scenarios, allowing companies to market virally.
Today the Web is no longer just a collection of sites and pages. It’s a collection of feeds and services that deliver content fluidly across a myriad of contexts, from portals and news readers to widgets, mashups, and consumer-generated media sites. The uncontrolled nature of Web distribution is increasingly disruptive to the media business, and smart marketers, particularly in the B2C model, are learning how to leverage Web 2.0 technology to track much of the unfettered content to initiate transactions, build brand recognition, and create advertising opportunities that you didn’t see just a few years ago.
In addition, the vendor market has matured to the point where there are now dozens of technologies that support this. These technologies, based on digital rights management platforms that media once hoped could effectively lock up digital content, now are effective at enabling new business models for advertisers and marketers based on open distribution.
About to head out of my hotel room for day 2 of the Gartner CRM Conference. Day 1 was a whirlwhind, and we were lucky enough to have some great meetings with some key analysts.
One of the things I like about this conference is that it reminds me just how large the overall ecosystem is for CRM. We tend to pay the most attention to the core CRM application providers…but CRM includes big data warehouse players, telephony network providers, billing, etc. It is a pretty large universe, and it is good to see all the areas in relative good health.
There’s been a bit of added hype this year, as expected, around “social CRM” and the media attached to that concept. We had some great talks with analysts and attendees about it, and I still think we as an industry are in a learning phase. Still trying to pick out the useful web properties for integration and discover best practices for creating next generation CRM systems that incorporate tradtional lead and opportunity management and new media and relationship mining capabilities.
A lot of interesting questions arose from our discussions. Namely, how ethical (or legal) is it to leverage public user networks like facebook for traditional email marketing? Sure, we can find out that this contact went to college with someone on my sales team and reach out personally using that as an introduction, but will the time come where LinkedIn or Facebook networks can get imported into CRM systems as target lists for lead management? I’m not so sure it can or will happen like that. And that is probably a good thing.
Lots of great sessions today…I’m sure other questions will pop up as well…
Over the course of several conversations with Gartner analysts today, here at the firm’s CRM Summit in Washington D.C., an interesting topic was brought up more than once: the use of 2nd generation CRM solutions as a “Band-Aid” for older, outdated solutions. In other words, using applications like SugarCRM as a desktop, metadata management solution that the Siebel’s and SAP’s of the world feed into so end users get the benefit of a fresh interface.
It’s an interesting problem companies are facing. Tough economic times mean businesses can ill afford to spend the money and time ripping out and replacing these systems altogether. So rather than replacing these dinosaurs outright, they’re turning to companies like ourselves to act as the desktop interface for the end users, with data being feed into them in real-time.
Fortunately, open and transparent APIs and the open source model have acted as the vehicle by which businesses are starting to accomplish quick fixes such as these. Then again, as one Gartner analyst mentioned, are quick fixes such as these simply delaying the inevitable? I’d have to say yes.
The new Sienfeld ads for Microsoft confuse me. I mean, yeah the show Sienfeld was “a show about nothing” but do the commercials have to follow suit?
If this is Microsoft’s attempt at countering those “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads, then chalk round one up as a failure.
The Mac ads may be simple and the humor very stale. But they actually discuss the product and make seemingly valid claims about the peceived superiority of the Mac OS, features and peripherals.
This ad just makes me wonder if Microsoft still sells software…
