In the last year I’ve taken note of emerging technologies that are driving the concept of Internet-based selling, and that spell the demise of the large, enterprise-size sales forces. Current economic conditions will only hasten this process, as businesses look to cut travel expenses and work budget-cutting processes and technologies into the way they interact with their customers.

On that note, I was impressed by today’s announcement that a Silicon Valley-based startup called PhoneTopp made. You can read the details in the press release, but in a nutshell, the new service allows users to stream segments of a Web cast to your smart phone via 3G networks and new cloud-based architectures being built into today’s smart phones, while the audio taps into the phone’s voice service.

While the initial offering is focused around Web conferencing, the synergies between these capabilities and demoing…say a software solution…are almost limitless. While certain industries are more conducive to these capabilities then others, imagine the capabilities of such an offering and the impact it could have on a company’s ability to market and sell to prospective customers, while at the same time cutting travel costs for in-person meetings?

And according to a recent Gartner survey that PhoneTopp highlights in the release, the support will be there. By 2010, Web conferencing will be available to 75 percent of corporate users as standard facility alongside capabilities like email and calendaring. The best part? Pricing is expected to fall somewhere around $10 a month for access, which makes such services available to event the smallest SMB.

I’m not an economist…in fact, the events of the past few months have taught me that I basically know very little about how the world economy actually works. All the classes I took in school about economics and market theory were way too logical to prepare me for the kind of shocking discoveries I’d make researching (for my own twisted pleasure) the events that would lead up to the global credit mess in which we are now all finding ourselves, in some form or another.

An associate sent me this link - an article written by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker and someone with an understandable pessimism if not skepticism when it comes to all things Wall Street. I read the article with great interest - mainly because it talks about the deferment of valuations away from actual sub-prime loans, towards an “idea” of sub-prime loans. It is a deconstructionist financial theory that can make ones head spin.

But the end takeaway for me, after short panicy feelings of uncertainty, was that hopefully, finally, value will come back in to the equation. And by “the equation.” I mean - life as we know it. Not to sound too proto-Marxist, but the concept of surplus value, derivatives markets, or deleveraged asset value (or something like that) is all too much of a cop out to actually working hard, proving and providing value.

I think we’re already seeing that in the software world. Beyond open source (which I argue is inherently value-based) we are seeing software giants move towards freemium models, become more price elastic in a good way, and in essence utilize distributed computing (now the cloud) concepts to provide processing, application and data service power on a more value-based delivery and pricing model.

We are not yet at a true utility model for cloud and related concepts like SaaS, but I think that we are moving towards that type of scenario. The subscription model is inherently value-based: if you don’t think you’re getting your money’s worth, stop paying. And I think the providers that master the subscription model and/or utility models and can execute with consistency and agility will be the next IPO darlings when that market starts up again. And hopefully, the price tags on these equities will be more soundly valued this time around.

A new IDC report released today points to the accelerated growth that open source applications are experiencing in Asia among SMBs. The report underlines some of the obvious advantages to open source, such as vendor lock-in, access to the source code, and availability to the developer community.

But the comment that really caught my attention, and which underscores the flexibility and scalability of the commercial open source model, is:

Small and midsize businesses are among the early adopters of open source enterprise applications in Asia, where the majority of open source vendors are based outside the region, according to an IDC report released Tuesday.

Taken in the context of today’s economic conditions, the ability of vendors to market and sell outside the parameters of their own sales force via the Internet will become a vital element in weathering the storm. Commercial open source leverages and multiples that concept by giving developers across the globe the freedom to access our solution for absolutely free.

A perfect example: Japan, where we have dozens of installations of SugarCRM installed since late 2005 and not a single employee ever based there.

I’ve read, as I’m sure most of you already have, that Circuit City is filing for Chapter 11 amid the pounding it’s recently taken from suppliers and the economic depression.

Whether they weather the storm remains to be seen, but Circuit City has always held a special place in my heart because they’re a company that always seemed to get everything right but the customer service, which in my opinion usually stunk. The few times I did purchase electronics from that store, dealing with their customer service department felt like a time warp. Minus their Web site, it seemed they could be completely out of touch with the needs and manner in which to deal with younger consumers.

Fast forward to a new SugarCRM customer I spoke with last week, which is doing a great job of redefining customer service via Web 2.0. They’re leveraging Sugar’s open source architecture and Web 2.0 to build a system to connect self-service transactions on a Web portal to their contact center, with Sugar Enterprise “sitting” in the middle.

They’re also building instant messaging into their contact center to allow an agent who is unable to resolve a customer problem to reach an expert via IM and presence technology, and will deploy tools such as voice portals, email, and Web chat functionality to work alongside Web 2.0 technologies and unified communication applications, all integrated within Sugar.

Nor are they going overboard on the Web 2.0 wave. They’re being smart, cherry-picking the solutions that have tangible business benefits for both the company and customer experience.

The alternative is ignoring these increasing popular channels and damaging your company’s ability to better service its customers via experiences, much like Circuit City did.

I am not an iPhone guy. In fact, I rarely listen to my iPod - as I ride a motorcycle everywhere and value my life over some good tunes while riding.

But that said, I am a technophile and just as there are Mac and PC heads - I am a Blackberry head. My friends and I are all way into the fact that Blackberry is more business-focused and not as, well, Mac-like as the iPhone. Call it preference. But at the same time, we are all agreed that the Bold and Storm are both way cool and can not wait to get our hands on them, even if they break some unwritten Blackberry rules - such as touch screen, etc.

But what we also always liked about the Blackberry was that it was, for the most part, not playing the carrier exclusivity game that Apple played with AT&T. My Blackberry on Verizon was the Same as my friend’s on AT&T and my other friend’s gadgets on T-Mobile, etc. And with Blackberry Messenger we can all talk without using any of our data plan minutes or texts. Great.

Now all that is changing. The new ads for the Blackberry Bold and Storm imply that either AT&T (Bold) or Verizon (Storm) will be the (for the time being) exclusive carriers for each device. Not cool. Especially in this economy, the concept of scarcity or exclusivity is not the best tact to take in my opinion. Retail sales are down for the first time in ages across the board, and if anything, the type of long term decision (contracts, etc.) that go with changing phones at the holiday season cannot be further hampered by not having what you want available from the provider you prefer.

I know that in exchange for exclusivity, the gadget provider tends to benefit. But in the long run, creating scarcity in this economy may prove not to be the smartest move if you ask me.

A Blackberry with a touch screen?  Coming soon to your favorite cellular provider, maybe…

After I put together my last post yesterday on my take on where social CRM investments should lie, I had a great talk with Tim Hickernell, and analyst with Info-Tech research who has long been covering collaborative CRM and related topics.

We started talking about the Facebook/LinkedIn dilemma and Tim brought up a good point, which he calls the “magic/tragic” aspect of the social CRM scenario. What Tim means, is that for every 10 great levels of connection an agent might have with a prospect - it only take one disconnect to destroy the potential relationship. For example, if a prospect is a huge Ohio State fan and is communicating with a rep through Facebook, he may shy away from a deal or the vendor if the rep in question has Michigan State allegiances posted all over his profile.

This is an extreme case, and I don’t think being a fan of a sports team would nix a deal outright. but political, religious, etc. associations on a rep’s profile in a social networking site could have some negative impact on some prospects’ opinions.

All too often, the value of social CRM is seen as one directional: The seller is mining social networks for valuable information. While this is true, for the vendor to have any authenticity or legitimacy in selling through these new channels, it must be understood that this is a two-way street. Visibility is gained by both parties. Now, this is not a bad thing. But I think that guidelines for social CRM sales teams may spring up to downplay potential pitfalls. For example, more vanilla profiles across the board for reps and other customer-facing company personnel would be a good start.

Social CRM brings a lot of cool capabilities into traditional B2B CRM. But we are very much at the front end of the learning curve. A lot of issues are going to pop up, and we need to anticipate the unexpected, if we can’t be totally prepared.

I came across a great blog today by David Young, the CEO of cloud computing vendor Joyent. Fresh off the coattails of some of the comments made by SugarCRM’s John Roberts during our San Francisco Acceleration event on Tuesday, including the importance that open source will play in the cloud computing space. Young lists a number of interesting points within the blog, but in a nutshell, speaks to the importance that cloud computing should be open and transparent, and not proprietary.

Developers should be able to interact with the cloud computer, to do business with it, without having to get on the phone with a sales person, or submit a help ticket. In other words, the customer should be able to truly get on-demand computing when they demand, whenever they demand.

He states early on that “no vendor currently does everything that’s required to serve customers well,” in the context of APIs and access to cloud computing platforms. On that point I disagree. The concepts that Young is speaking to has been underscored and put into practice by open source vendors, such as ourselves and others. Even our proprietary-based brethern are following suit with greater access to APIs and underlying code.

It’s for those reasons that open source and cloud computing have a natural synergy. The Web has become a ubiquitous platform for applications of all kinds. The success of concepts like cloud computing and enterprise collaboration depend on the continued development and penetration of open, standards-based development languages complementing ever-present open source infrastructure and delivery methods. Without it, the “cloud’ will never truly support the interoperability across solutions and organizations that so many of spoken about.

As we know, there has been a lot of news coming out of CRM vendor’s marketing machines these days around social CRM. Oracle made a lot of noise during its OpenWorld event a few weeks ago. And now both SAP and Salesforce.com are re-upping their social CRM antes.

SAP made some financial moves to aid the development of LinkedIn as a strong tool to further social CRM in terms of relationship capital mining. And this week Salesforce.com announced that it was working more closely with Facebook to add social capabilities to its CRM tools.

Between the two decisions, I think that SAP made the better choice. I am not saying this because I see SAP as less of a competitive threat to SugarCRM than Salesforce.com. Rather, I think that LinkedIn adds more definite business value than Facebook.  LinkedIn grew up primarily as a resource for recruiters and people looking to network. Facebook’s roots are in college kids posting pictures of themselves doing keg stands. That fundamental difference means a lot. LinkedIn is about business from the get go, and the data inside that property can provide strong business connections, unearth relationships to prospects and offers a messaging system to create introductions etc.

Facebook does have some of these aspects. But the platform is almost too open - LinkedIn has a driven business purpose while Facebook has a lot of frivolous end-user value. The “networking” side of Facebook allows for too much segmentation, I would argue. The business paths and associations in LinkedIn are more direct and meaningful in my opinion. For example, it is easier for me as a CRM administrator to map relationships between a single employee and, say, four companies they may have worked on than to map the inter-workings of an individual with their myriad networks listed in Facebook: work, school, friends, geographies, sports allegiances, etc. The low hanging fruit of valuable information lies in LinkedIn, I would argue.

As social CRM management becomes more sophisticated and the concepts more understood, best practices revealed, etc., then I believe properties like Facebook will provide more marketing and segmentation value to all kinds of CRM initiatives. But for now, in the core B2B CRM world, LinkedIn adds more of a true business value.

Yesterday was quite a day - between the CRM Acceleration event and the election it was really non-stop for me. But definitely worth it. This CRM Acceleration was the last one in our “world tour” in 2008, and fitting to have it in our backyard, as it were.

The event went really well. Steve Madeira and Austin Sheppard (from Sugar customers EASi and Wireless Capital Partners respectively) gave awesome presentations and provided some great CRM best practices insight on the panel. The partner presentations from InsideView and Talend were great as well. It is great that we have partners in many areas making it easier to bring in a ton of data sources into Sugar and make it all add value to CRM processes.

The prospects and customers in attendance were great as well. I had a lot of great conversations with many prospects, and I love when our sales and technical guys can demo or explain ways to optimize their deployments…seeing eyes light up when a customer learns of cool functionality they can start using when they get back to their offices is always a great sight to see.

Of course, the event ended with an amazing reception with some great food and drinks. Our events manager Kathleen Johnston really goes the extra mile for these events, and I for one can not wait to see what she puts together for SugarCon in February.

The sugar team also ad a great time at the election-themed party that InsideView and a few other Sugar partners threw. All told, a great event and a great evening in the city. Thanks again to everyone for making this final Acceleration of 2008 such a great event.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my time here at SugarCRM, and it’s been a great one. Perhaps fittingly, yesterday’s San Francisco Acceleration event underlined just how far the company has come in the past year, and over the last 4+ years.

Just yesterday, we hit an exciting milestone on SugarForge.org: 5 million downloads across all 550+ open source projects, a significant landmark for the world’s largest open source CRM project.

But outside Sugar’s own internal growth and acceptance globally, I’ve been most impressed with the strides that open source has made as an application development model in the past year(s). When I first stated in this industry as an editorial intern at CRM magazine in April of 2004 (which ironically enough was the same month that John Roberts and gang were starting SugarCRM), open source as a viable alternative to proprietary-based CRM solutions was little more than an afterthought. And to be honest, I also remember the first time I ever meet John Roberts as a journalist, received the low-down on commercial open source CRM and figured that might be the last time I’ll ever hear of SugarCRM ever again.

Now here we are over four years later with more than 3,500 customers, I now work for Sugar, and as John pointed out during his keynote yesterday, commercial open source has become an established business model and the infrastructural foundation for many of the technologies now driving the market and CRM industry today, cloud computing and Web 2.0 to name a few.

And just how SugarCRM has left its indelible mark on the CRM industry to date, I can’t wait to see how we continue to break the mold for such emerging technologies moving forward.