Rob Bois Quotations

Some customers have the expectation that you flip a switch and you're done. But there are setup costs and training costs and ramp-up costs. There's getting the system customized to match the business context and then getting people to use the system. CRM implementations are still complex, even if they're delivered in an on-demand fashion.

Revenue has become a top priority, and companies have to get something in place quickly to meet that need. Hosted has become very appealing to get up and running quickly with CRM -- without involving I.T. budgets.

But each company has varying degrees of adherence to Web-services standards and varying methods of supporting those systems.

Today, it doesn't match the full breadth of other on-demand CRM offerings, but they're headed in that direction.

It isn't a scalability issue. Typically when you're talking about an organization that will have more than a thousand CRM users, you're talking about a broad implementation that will touch more areas of the company and will involve more business processes.

Larger companies are now seeing hosted CRM as a way to put the application in a single department to try it out, and then roll it out to the rest of the enterprise later.

Onyx says they have a poison pill in place, though I haven't seen it yet. It seems like an extreme method, but it could happen.

We knew that the small and midsize business segment would be a large part of this market, but we were a little surprised at how many large enterprises were eager to evaluate the software-as-service option.

There are several drivers in this market. One surprise has been larger enterprises that want CRM for a branch office or a department. Also, there are so many big players in the market now that it's been creating interest in hosted services.

We're past the first generation of mobile devices. Many technical hurdles have been eliminated, and that will be reflected in the market.

The small to midsize business segment is a very large part of the hosted market, ... Software-as-service lets companies get CRM in place quickly without having to raid the I.T. budget to do it.

Salesforce.com is selling an on-demand model that gives customers the ability to roll out a CRM deployment quickly and easily and then scale that deployment either up or down to meet their business needs. So far, small and midsize businesses have taken the best advantage of that, but we are starting to see larger companies that are seriously evaluating an on-demand model.

Salesforce.com is an ambassador for this space because it reached critical mass first. So when Salesforce.com has a problem, people start questioning the whole delivery model.

They've been hinting at this for nine months. Given that amount of time, you might have expected a broader offering. This is not even full-blown SFA. It's really just contact management.

They are going after existing SAP customers. We've talked to customers and while it is a nice checkbox option to have, it's not the primary criteria they use when selecting an on-demand solution.

A big benefit to software-as-service is that it lets companies get CRM in place quickly without the kind of budget hassles you see with buying applications, ... There's a feeling, especially among small and midsize businesses, that a hosted solution will help realize ROI more quickly.

It's a little uncommon to see a press release like that. The only precedent is the Oracle/PeopleSoft deal from a year ago, when PeopleSoft felt Oracle was being unresponsive. Clearly there's a communication issue here.

It's a little bit of a balancing act on Oracle's part. For now, it's kind of antithetical to their traditional message of a single unified suite.

The use of Microsoft's .NET also has Web-services implications within an organization because it provides an effective way to integrate Microsoft applications together.

The vendors are selling fewer full suite deals, multimillion dollar soup-to-nuts implementations, and we see that reflected in how they are trying to build services-oriented architectures, so they can deploy modules rather than big-bang implementations. This allows customers to piece together the business functions they need -- even modules from different vendors -- to meet the specific demands of automatic processing rather than having to buy an entire suite at the outset.

If Microsoft would put its stake in the ground on this, it could definitely make a pretty major impact in this business,

Because most of these are monthly investments and in the past were smaller deployments, we haven't heard about the big disasters yet. The larger implementations will be the ones to watch.

This is a good time for them to make the biggest impact in CRM software.

The hosted model has reinvigorated a market that has failed to grow over the past several years. The hosted category has changed the whole perception of customer management with faster implementations, quicker time to value and easy customization.