Latest CRM Software Industry News

As the popularity of wireless networks in homes and small businesses continues to soar, so do the chances that outsiders will hack unsecured networks and use them for malicious purposes.
Very few home and business owners realize the importance of securing their networks and the risks they incur by not doing so. It is often up to solution providers to solve the problem. Fortunately, several methods and products are available to help mend the holes.

Michael Young, principal at Connected Homes, a San Jose, Calif.-based home integrator, says the starting point is often helping customers realize the implications of not securing their wireless networks.

“You try not to scare people too much, but they need to realize [the impact],” Young says. For example, Young notes that a home’s unsecured wireless network could be used by a neighbor for downloading copyrighted material. It is often difficult to determine who on a network downloaded particular files, so the network owner could be sued by the Recording Industry Association of America or other organizations.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, says there haven’t yet been cases of homeowners in the United States prosecuted for the activities of other users who access their WLANs to conduct criminal activity. “However, it could lead to that house being the first step in the investigation,” Bankston notes.

In March, an Illinois man was arrested after police noticed him sitting with a laptop in a car outside a nonprofit agency’s building. The man was accessing the Internet through the organization’s wireless network, and was charged with remotely accessing another computer system without the owner’s approval and fined $250.

Small businesses with unsecured WLANs may also be leaving open doors that can lead into the corporate network, says Greg Starr, principal at See-Comm, a New Boston, Texas, integrator. “If someone gets through the WLAN connection, they could potentially get to the company’s servers. These companies are leaving themselves wide open to a number of different types of attacks by not enabling security on their wireless networks,” Starr says.

Even home users are at risk if they access their employers’ secured systems via unsecured wireless networks. Attackers can use the network to gain access to the corporate systems.

One problem is that people generally don’t keep up with changing passwords and settings on their home and SOHO WLANs, says Robert Cox, principal at Cox Network and PC Services, a Bel Air, Md.-based integrator. Integrators can easily boost customers’ WLAN security by disabling SSID and setting up encryption keys to be changed on a regular basis, Cox says. VPNs also are helpful for creating secure remote connections.

Cox notes that the wireless signals in products from some vendors, such as Buffalo Technology, Hawking Technologies and SMC, can be modified so they don’t go beyond the building’s walls. While customers sometimes don’t want the extra expense for such access points, the investment is usually worthwhile.

Aaron Fuhrman, an engineer at Home Technologies, a Bellevue, Wash., integrator, says his company frequently limits the broadcast range of WLANs through power and antenna adjustments. “You can use a directional antenna so it only covers a building instead of radiating the signal in a 360[-degree] pattern,” he explains.

Another option is to configure the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) security most vendors build into their products but most users ignore, Fuhrman says. “WPA is the more secure of the two and is not susceptible to brute force hacks,” he says. When installing older products that use WEP,
Fuhrman adds an extra layer of protection by using MAC address filtering, which prevents unauthorized users from accessing the WLAN even if they have the encryption key.

When it comes to encryption, a measured approach works best, says David Ducharme, CEO of Total Home Technologies, Salem, Mass. “Usually the more encryption you have, the less the range of the products, so it’s kind of a balancing act in some ways.”

Vendors are beginning to address the issue of unsecured WLANs with products designed specifically for homes and SOHOs. Kaspersky Lab’s recently-released Internet Security 6.0 includes software that scans home and SOHO wireless and wired networks, blocks access or limits the activities that can be done within the network and includes an antihacker feature, says Charles Waelde, senior technical engineer at the Moscow-based company.

“To protect the workstation, you also have the ability to put the PC into stealth mode. This will completely isolate the PC on the network from other machines and no one will be able to see you on the network,” Waelde says. If attackers use brute force, ping of death or denial-of-service attacks, the product can deny access from the IP address until the user allows access or blocks it permanently.

WiTopia, Reston, Va., just launched its SecureMyWiFi service, which starts at $9.99 per year for home users and $99 per year for businesses. The software is downloaded to the customer’s network and uses an external server to provide authentication, encryption and other services. The company provides integrators with a 40 percent margin on the price of the first year of service, and also offers the software preinstalled on other vendors’ access points.

Mount Laurel, N.J.-based TrustEli last year launched its Eli Managed Service appliance for homes and small businesses, and recently signed a distribution agreement with D&H Distributing. Eli includes a firewall, content filtering, wireless gateway, VPN support and protection against viruses, spam, spyware and phishing attacks. The cost is $199.99 with a $9.99 monthly service fee.

Another important aspect of securing wireless networks is documenting every step of the process and recording changes to equipment settings, says Gordon van Zuiden, principal at CyberManor, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based integrator. For an integrator with numerous customers, each with their own security settings and equipment specifics, keeping track of the details can be challenging.

“If you are going to start adding or changing things in the wireless network, you need to keep a database with all of the information logged,” he says. “If this information isn’t available, it will end up as an expensive wasted service call.”

Van Zuiden uses QuickBase, an online database from Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit, for all of his service requests. QuickBase is useful because integrators can specify information such as client names, technical parameters of the home, IP addresses, logins and passwords. “The best part about QuickBase is that our engineers can access it online and get the configuration information at the customer’s location,” he says.

Integrators can rant and rave about the many problems with unsecured networks and the reasons to protect them, but demonstrations of the problem often are the most effective ways to convince hesitant customers. Young uses NetStumbler, Windows-based software that can detect open WLANs, to show clients all the open access points in their neighborhoods.

“I’ll arrive early, fire up my laptop in their driveway and tell them the name of their access points before I even walk in the door,” Young says. “Something that dramatic tends to make them realize that their WLAN signals don’t stop at the walls of their home.”

With more than one-third of the Fortune 100 tapping QuickBase for CRM, sales management and project management, Intuit thinks it has a winner on its hands.
Salesforce.com isn’t the only game in town when it comes to CRM-as-a-service. In a certain sense, it isn’t even the oldest. The former Siebel Systems Inc. launched its own ASP-oriented CRM service (the ill-fated sales.com) seven years ago, after all, and a host of like-minded vendors—each with ASP-based business models—also tried to make a go of it by providing hosted CRM.

Salesforce.com did establish and help popularize the CRM-as-a-service model, however. And thanks in large part to Salesforce.com’s success, a number of companies—from hosted CRM pure plays such as NetSuite Inc. (the former NetLedger), to shrink-wrapped-cum-CRM-as-a-service competitors such as Sage Software Inc. (the former Best Software) to specialty vendors such as Amdocs—have established thriving hosted CRM practices.

You can add Intuit Inc.’s QuickBase CRM- and software-as-a-service (SaaS) entry to that list, too. QuickBase started out as OneBase, a hosted database and lightweight enterprise applications service developed by former ASP Turning Mill Software. Following the millennial ASP implosion, OneBase was acquired by Intuit, which—in late 2000—rechristened it QuickBase. Since then, QuickBase—like Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart (of Blazing Saddles fame)—has rapidly become a big underground success in the SaaS space: it’s used by more than one-third of the Fortune 100 (34 companies) and has a thriving mid-market business, too.

QuickBase this week announced the latest and greatest version of its SaaS product. Like Salesforce.com—which, by virtue of its hosted architecture, can quickly expose new features and capabilities to users—QuickBase users can start taking immediate advantage of the revamped service’s improved dashboarding and charting features, officials claim.

So much for similarities. In point of fact, QuickBase officials argue, their SaaS entry actually differs from Salesforce.com in many key respects. “Our focus is providing a business process platform, not necessarily [a collection of] applications,” says Jana Eggers, general manager of Intuit’s QuickBase division. “If you’re familiar with [IBM’s] Lotus Notes, you can see what I mean. What Notes brought [to the table] was business process-centric applications. I ran a company on Notes, and we had our customer service application on there, we had our recruiting application on there, we had our sales management application on there, and the power of it was it kept us all on the same page. Quickbase is that kind of platform, but the advantage [over Notes] is you don’t have the challenge of keeping it up and running, because it’s a hosted service.”

Be that as it may, QuickBase—Like SaaS competitor Salesforce.com—aspires to be more than just a hosted CRM package. It offers sales management, marketing, project management, and other hosted processes, too. Its value proposition, Eggers says, is its straightforwardness: QuickBase exposes a richly declarative interface, such that sales representatives, sales managers, or executives can themselves create reports—typically by using declarative queries—or (in the newest version) structure dashboard views. “That’s why IT really appreciates [QuickBase], because it’s a tool that the business person can understand, and that [IT] can still quickly and easily support,” she comments. Don’t let its straightforward declarative query model fool you, Eggers stresses: Beneath the covers, QuickBase boasts complex query and analysis capabilities. “Quickbase has its own reporting engine, just like you would expect from any best-of-breed tool, and we’ve built in [support for] cross-tab, regular, and static table-type reporting. Charting is one of the things that we enhanced in this release, along with rollover capabilities to see exact information, and we also have drill-down capabilities, too,” she argues.

The newest QuickBase revision also delivers an improved dashboard experience, Eggers says, with Asynchronous Java over XML (AJaX) support and a more interactive user interface. “In this version, we’ve really improved our dashboarding capabilities so that it’s laid out in the way that you want, so it gives the users the information they need very quickly and very easily,” she explains. Power users, of course, can still export QuickBase data to Excel (.XLS), or to other formats (such as comma separated values).

QuickBase dashboards, like QuickBase reports, can be sourced to right-time or static data, Eggers says. “We call these [right-time reports or dashboards] views, and the reason why we call them views is because it’s actually a view into live data. Reports, even dashboards can feel kind of static,” she indicates.

The newest release of QuickBase also helps automate report distribution, Eggers says. “We have some very proactive reporting. There’s a lot of automation that reaches out for information and sends it to me, so twice a week I get information on customer roadblocks. We have a customer support team that sends something that says, ‘This is where customers get roadblocks,’ and I can also set up kind of like a dashboard that gives me an at-a-glance view of customer roadblocks.”

Software-as-a-service applications from Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com are driving change in architecture, appearance and business model of enterprise applications, turning the sector from a niche into a multi-billion dollar market. But the business model isn’t without its challenges.
Calling the trend a “disruptive phenomenon,” Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Kash Rangan said in a report released Friday that upstarts, such as Salesforce.com, WebEx, RightNow, Taleo, Blackboard and NetSuite, will benefit most, compared with traditional software players Microsoft, SAP and Oracle attempting to move into the space.

Part of the disruption will come from the method in which traditional software companies recognize revenue from SaaS sales, according to AMR Research Inc. senior vice president Jim Shepherd. “If SAP sells a system today for $1 million, they recognize the million dollars on the day they sell it and it goes into the revenue for that quarter,” he said. “If they were to sell that same system as a software as a service, they may get $20,000 per month for the next 10 years.”

The same dollar amount is spent on applications, but logged in accounting books differently under the SaaS business model. Assuming there’s a strong demand for these services, it could have a negative short-term impact on license revenue at traditional software vendors, Shepherd said.

That’s part of the reason Microsoft, Oracle and SAP didn’t rush into offering these services offerings, which companies like Intuit Inc. have been offering for years.

For years, Intuit has delivered TurboTax and QuickBooks through multi-tenant SaaS applications, where multiple companies or consumers run the application on the same code base.

Intuit QuickBase General Manager Janna Eggers said it’s easy for companies to get started in the space, but difficult to deliver the service. “Look at Salesforce.com, for example, the challenges they had earlier this year to keep their site up and running,” she said. “Getting a full service SaaS platform up and running quickly is difficult and it’s going to take major players, rather than startups, to deliver them long term.”

One way of looking at SaaS, also referred to as OnDemand, is by seeing it as a distribution model in which Web applications are hosted by the vendor or service provider, such as Intuit’s TurboTax or QuickBooks. Recent examples of SaaS applications offered by Google include Google Spreadsheet and Writely, because they are Internet-based rather than desktop-bound applications. Salesforce.com offers customer relationship management (CRM) applications through the SaaS model.

Both Eggers and Rangan agree the model is transitioning from a niche to multibillion dollar market, but the Merrill Lynch analyst believes traditional software companies adding SaaS will find it more difficult to make the move.

By simplifying the software stack and integration requirements, companies offering SaaS services can address market requirements better. But industry veteran Eggers questions whether Microsoft can change fast enough to keep companies, such as Saleforce.com, at bay.

New features include dynamic forms, dashboards and compatibility with Microsoft Project

June 20, 2006 (Computerworld) — Intuit Inc. announced today that it’s girding its QuickBase Web-hosted collaboration software to compete with offerings from Microsoft Corp. and software-as-a-service start-ups by adding new features such as easy-to-build dynamic forms and dashboards and compatibility with Microsoft Project management software.

Best-known for its Quicken line of personal finance software, the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor has carved out a tidy business with QuickBase since its first release in 2001. QuickBase is used by several thousand companies, including 43 of the Fortune 100, mostly at the department or workgroup level to enhance workflow and share data among remote workers, according to Intuit.

Those features were relatively rare when QuickBase was first released. But in February, Microsoft released Office Live, a set of hosted collaboration applications based on SharePoint, its collaboration server, aimed at small businesses. It is also readying new versions of enterprise software such as SharePoint and InfoPath, which let users create XML-based forms.

“Intuit has done a pretty good job of migrating some of its user base onto the Web,” said Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based consulting firm. “Microsoft clearly can’t ignore this area.”

In addition, Web-focused companies like Google Inc., with its Google Spreadsheets and Writely beta applications, and smaller start-ups have released a raft of Web-based applications that mimic Office applications and provide Internet-based collaboration.

So far, neither Microsoft’s nor other vendors’ offerings have tempted Anne Walsh, a database administrator at Genworth Financial Inc. who has used QuickBase for five years. About 250 employees in her division, which sells insurance for long-term care, use QuickBase for sharing documents and keeping track of processes.

“We were an extremely siloed organization,” she said. “People didn’t feel like they were in the loop. Also, salespeople were e-mailing PDFs of spreadsheets to each other. That led to the problem of dueling versions.” Now, “rather than manage 10 million spreadsheets, I can have a single source of truth that I can then disseminate everywhere,” she said. Workflow has improved so much, Walsh said, that “people grab me in the hallway and literally hug and tell me that QuickBase has changed their life.”

Other divisions at Genworth, a 7,000-employee financial services provider in Richmond, Va., that was spun out of General Electric Co. in 2004, are considering moving to QuickBase, Walsh said.

Mark Shnier, vice president of customer service and logistics at G.E. Shnier Co., a $150 million-a-year Toronto-based wholesaler of carpet and tile, said nontechnical users like himself can now create dynamic forms using QuickBase that add or delete questions and fields depending on respondents’ answers.

“I don’t know Javascript or HTML. I’d say I’m about a B+ level user of Excel. But I can develop applications pretty quickly with QuickBase,” said Shnier.

The company integrates data from its central ERP system into QuickBase. It also uses the software to centrally host important documents that are accessible by 200 employees.

DeGroot said that while Intuit “may have moved more upmarket than other vendors,” it’s products are still mostly purchased by corporate users at the workgroup level, rather than implemented by central IT. That may allow it to fit in a niche between Microsoft’s Office Live and the offerings of Web start-ups, which are designed for smaller firms, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and InfoPath, which are designed for big companies and “require buy-in from the entire organization and take a lot of work to manage,” said DeGroot.

One mistake too many companies make is to reserve the majority of a project’s budget for license fees and implementation. When that happens, other expenditures — such as support for new users, training and changing the use of a system to meet new corporate needs — tend to be

Choosing the right system in the first place is key to optimizing your investment in a customer relationship management system  — and that process can be strewn with potential pitfalls, as Part 1 in this two-part series points out.

While the selection process can be unnerving, implementation can be a downright nightmare — and, in some cases, what happens after a project is over can send a company straight back to square one.

Take the sad, true story of “Company X.”
Tales of Woe
Company X decided to invest in a CRM system provided by a vendor whose name is automatically associated with the industry. The choice made sense at the time; few executives past the boom years of the late 1990s were willing to take a chance recommending a system that might not deliver. It might be expensive, the thinking went, but it was a safe choice.

Two years and US$2 million dollars later, Company X realized it had chosen poorly.

“I think by the time we came into the picture, maybe eight people were willing to use it,” Jana Eggers, general manager of QuickBase, a division of Intuit, told CRM Buyer. “The problem was, the system never matched the business processes at the company or how the employees worked.”

Eventually, Company X decided to move to QuickBase, she said.

“Company Y,” which had chosen a system from the same vendor, experienced a similar horror story, according to Infinity Info Systems, the firm that was called in after things had gone badly awry.

“It was a pilot project lasting 18 months — a time frame we just couldn’t comprehend — and millions had already been spent,” Yacov Wrocherinsky, Infinity’s founder and CEO, told CRM Buyer. “We came in to help them assess why the system wasn’t working the way they wanted it to.”

Company Y also switched to a new system “for a fraction of what they were paying to maintain the old system,” he said.

The moral of these stories: Even an application with a marquee name will not work for every company.

Fortunately, companies are becoming savvier about their CRM implementations , Wrocherinsky said. Pilot projects rarely stretch beyond a year, and firms expect to see tangible results much sooner.

Sometimes, though, they do not realize the results they had initially expected — and when that happens, their first inclination is to invest more money in the project. For some firms, this additional expenditure proves to be worthwhile. Others, though, believe it is more cost-effective to cut their losses.

From the Dramatic …
A tried-and-true knowledge base has built up over the years for companies that want to ensure their CRM projects are a success. Much of this work takes place before the system is ever selected.

The companies that tend to succeed in the end, more often than not, are those that

map out their requirements for a system, including the processes it is expected to support;
are realistic in what the system can actually accomplish; and
set real-world financial goals for the projects.

However, it is also essential to plan for the second piece — what happens after the vendors, consultants and systems integrators have left the building and the company is live with its new purchase.

Of all the eventualities a company might foresee when planning for this phase of the project, ripping out a multimillion dollar CRM system and replacing it with another is the most dramatic — and, of course, the most painful.

It is still one that a company should consider.

“There is always that possibility, no matter how well thought out the selection process was, that the project will fail,” Eggers said. “If that happens, you have to be careful of how much you are going to spend trying to make it work.”

Pick that number in advance, she recommended, and stick to it.

… To the Mundane
There are other, less-dramatic eventualities for the post-implementation phase that a company should think through. In this phase, it is crucial to factor these considerations into the budget supporting the project.

One mistake too many companies make is to reserve the majority of a project’s budget for license fees and implementation. When that happens, other expenditures — such as support for new users, training and changing the use of a system to meet new corporate needs — tend to be underfunded.

“It is a given: Once you have the system in place, you have to keep nurturing it and supporting it,” Wrocherinsky said.

The most oft-repeated mistake following implementation is underinvestment in training, according to Michael Pessetti, vice president of sales  and marketing for SalesPage Technologies.

“Companies will save more and realize more return in the long run if they begin investing in training up front,” he told CRM Buyer.

Companies need to be smart about training, taking it beyond the one-size-fits-all sessions that vendors typically offer with their systems. Rather, he advised, training should be tailored to the various user communities and their requirements.

Training also must be ongoing — not only so that employees maintain their skill sets, but also to make sure they are up-to-date with any changes in the system’s use.

“Companies are dynamic. There will always be new hires, new product lines and services offered, and so on,” Pessetti said. Most companies look for systems that scale with the organization’s growth but then forget the training piece associated with those changes.

Maintenance — another post-implementation expenditure — is not quite the hidden drain on a budget that training can be. However, Pessetti noted, some firms are still not aware that vendors have become more flexible with their service level agreements — at least for those customers prepared to negotiate.

“I have seen companies spend too much on SLAs merely because they didn’t think to ask for concessions,” he remarked.

It is important to be up-to-date on industry trends — such as what discounts are considered the norm, which vendors are willing to negotiate, which do not budge, and so on.

As Pessetti pointed out, “a lot of companies don’t realize exactly how much can be negotiable in these agreements.”