For a while now, IBM has been shifting their focus from hardware to software, and recently, CFO Mark Loughridge told us that they were investing lost in business analytics. Today, the company announced a very large fruit of that endeavor: the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud. This product is the for IBM clients, and is accompanying the release of Blue Insight, which is an internal product that will be the world’s largest private cloud-computing analytics environment for business analytics.

Predating this release are the recent acquisitions of data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion, business analytics firm RedPill, and Canadian business intelligence developer Cognos. In addition, IBM recently performed a Global CIO study and found 83% of respondents were looking to business intelligence and analytics to boost competitiveness.

Blue Insight, the internal offering, will give IBM’s sales and development department (some 200,000 employees) the ability to gather data and information—from customer relationships to demand trends to shipping times—for more efficient decision making to gain further insight at point of sale. One of the most impressive aspects of Blue Insight is its scope: information will come from about 100 different info warehouses that make up more than a petabyte of information—100 times the content of the Library of Congress.

IBM Smart Analytics Cloud will provide customers with the same scalable architecture of Blue Insight, and like its internal sister, will tout many of the Cognos 8 BI tools. Customers will be able to create reports, dashboards, and scorecards for monitoring business performance, and also import data for strategic analysis. And the addition of this vast information source also gives IBM the opportunity to offer an impressive bundle: hardware, software, middleware, and consulting and maintenance services. And the folks at Forbes posit that if IBM adds data mining and real-time analytics, they will strike gold.

IBM’s foray into the software market has been extremely fruitful, and this new product will certainly spark copies from other software companies. It will be interesting to see who else joins the business analytics-cloud race.

Smartphones are proliferating at light speed, and applications for them—especially for the iPhone—are growing apace. The iPhone has long been the rival of the business-friendly BlackBerry, but since the advent of the iPhone, other smartphones are rolling out different features in an attempt to match it.

Most recently, the iPhone and the Android phones have taken center stage, and despite lackluster sales, many consider the latest Droid model as the mobile phone that will outdo the iPhone. The Droid has been positioned as a business phone in many ways—honing in on the BlackBerry crowd—but the phone’s projected coup remains to be seen. Regardless, both the Android phones and the iPhone could succeed the BlackBerry as the enterprise phone of choice—many companies are weary of paying for BlackBerry’s secure messaging server, and both the aforementioned phones will likely adopt similar secure messaging services soon.

So considering that the battle of the smartphones becomes more and more heated, and we see people of all professions carrying them, you’d think a deluge of mobile CRM applications (and news about them) would follow. But like the Droid takeover, the rise of the iPhone CRM application has yet to be seen, and it is very likely it may never be realized.

Devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone offer accessibility to more information, which can be very helpful to sales and field teams in need of CRM data. To remain competitive, it is becoming more important for these service people to have CRM information readily available, and thankfully most CRM vendors have applications for the major mobile devices at this point. When searching for a mobile solution—be it iPhone CRM or other—it’s important that the mobile employees’ needs match the IT and security priorities of the company. But what is most likely going to affect your mobile CRM selection—and the reason mobile CRM will probably never surpass the presence of the desktop application—is that it usually depends entirely on your choice of desktop solution. In most cases, it’s easiest to just rely on the mobile version of the native platform.

Those using on-demand platforms can readily access CRM data from their iPhone, since vendors like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM build their products in the cloud. Companies dealing mostly in legacy systems, like Oracle, usually develop separate applications, and some non-CRM companies are creating applications to extend CRM functionality to the smartphone.

There are a plethora of solutions, but the options for personalization, and how closely they resemble the native app are another story. Dealing with tons of data on a mobile device is not ideal, so an iPhone CRM application is very much “CRM lite.” In addition, security issues may have IT departments worrying about certain data being stored on mobile devices—many mobile CRM apps have offline components, and if the phone is stolen or lost this could be problematic. Fortunately, many vendors are incorporating data encryptions for mobile solutions to prevent the theft of valuable or confidential CRM data.

When it comes to choosing a mobile CRM solution, CRM Buyer has a few recommendations: find a mobile CRM component that correlates to the native application, and more importantly, be sure the mobile solution meets the sales staff’s needs. Should they find the app lacking, they will most likely enact their own solution, which leads to counterproductive fragmentation of information.

It has long been noted that the people benefitting the most from an Android or iPhone CRM application are sales people; aside from maybe help desk centers, they are also the ones thought to benefit the most from social CRM as well. Recently, the CEO of appssavvy, a consulting company that launches mobile applications, told the press his company would soon be expanding from social gaming apps to social CRM applications. Whether these social CRM apps will differ greatly from traditional iPhone CRM apps has yet to be seen, but it sounds like a space where mobile CRM could really grow, especially since social media platforms are already simple, and translate well onto mobile devices. In addition, social networking applications are popular on smartphones, so social CRM as an extension could be highly successful.

Not long ago, CDC Software announced plans to acquire on-demand companies in order to create one SaaS software solutions provider to complement its on-premise products for various verticals. Last week, CDC announced they have signed a binding term sheet for the future acquisition of a SaaS provider for not-for-profit (NFP) organizations; the name of the company was not disclosed.

Given the rise of SaaS—a recent global study by Avanade consultancy shows that within 2009 alone, the number of companies using only on-premise solutions decreased from 61% to 41%—this is a smart move for CDC to offer customers multiple deployment options. It is even smarter to offer a combination, as the hybrid SaaS model is proliferating at light speed. CDC plans to take these SaaS and on-premise offerings worldwide, via 22 offices and 1200 resellers and partners. In terms of the NFP vertical solution, business should be good—market research shows there are 1.5 million registered NFPs in North America alone, and SaaS solutions are extremely cost-effective. The soon-to-be-acquired company is venture-capital financed, and provides solutions for ERP, CRM, financial management, e-commerce and others, in one platform.

This pending acquisition will also be fruitful for other CDC solutions: it will provide cross-selling opportunities for CDC MarketFirst and CDC Respond by expanding product functionality into marketing automation, lead management, and complaint and feedback management. Full procurement of the unnamed company is expected by the end of 2009.

Recently, global IT consultancy Avanade commissioned Kelton Research for a global study about cloud computing and the adoption of SaaS, and the findings were pretty remarkable. The prominent thread in the study was that SaaS is catching on, and at an unprecedented rate, but it is carving a niche more as a hybrid platform—usage with a legacy system—than as a freestanding one.

Not only are more companies adopting SaaS, more are considering adoption than they were even earlier this year. A similar study was conducted in January, and at the time 54% of participants said they would not consider cloud computing solutions; the more recent survey shows a decrease to 37%. The previous poll also showed 61% of companies were using only internal IT systems, and today that number is down to 41%. Avanade’s study found that 68% of respondents were using SaaS at some level, but still about 30% of those said service outages were an issue.

Whatever security and reliability problems respondents had, 62% said they plan to expand their SaaS usage. However, the study had no real conclusion about whether this uptick in hybrid SaaS usage would lead those companies to move entirely to the cloud. The study did conclude that cloud computing will continue making inroads, but that some applications should remain on-premise. Avanade surmised that the gap between companies planning to adopt SaaS and those that aren’t will close in either 2011 or 2012. It will be interesting to see what ratio of cloud to on-premise usage this hybrid moves to in the future, and how controllable security and dependability can become.

The outpouring of Oracle OpenWorld news continues: Samsung SDS and Oracle have co-developed a native mobile CRM application. Last week, demonstrations of the new application were held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, but the week prior the product had a “soft debut” in San Diego that was met with positive reviews.

The application is for Samsung smartphones and is based on Oracle Siebel CRM, and will run on the Samsung Mobile Cloud Center (SMCC). The first release is for pharmaceutical companies, but Samsung SDS plans to develop similar CRM applications for other verticals. Oracle already offers mobile version of its CRM system, but it is a basic rendering in comparison to the new Samsung collaboration, which has more features. Some of the advancements include a hub-and-spoke graphic to show users their customers’ connections—as opposed to Oracle’s original spreadsheet for displaying such associations—communication records built into customer profiles, and complex graphs.

At OpenWorld, Oracle’s Anthony Lye spoke to the importance to moving toward mobile in the future, so it is no surprise that this CRM offering is only the first of Samsung’s projected efforts to target the enterprise market. In this regard, Samsung will concentrate on its Windows Mobile phones in 2010, and plans to continue to focus on applications as well as devices by maintaining partnership with Oracle.

Did you know that at www.vendordemo.com, you can watch hundreds of business software webinars and demos for free? You’ll also find documents at the site, including case studies, whitepapers, and brochures from industry leaders.  At VendorDemo, you can browse, share, and rate those videos and documents that help you most.  We’ve dedicated this issue of ERP Buzz to highlighting some of most popular content from the site.  Don’t miss these hot webinars!

Read more »

Today, the role of the contact center extends beyond simply answering questions and providing information.  With increasing call volumes; expanding agent responsibilities; and rising demands to deliver rapid, high-quality service, businesses can find it hard to keep up.  That’s where today’s advanced call center software solutions come in.

Designed to simplify service-related interactions by coordinating and automating agent tasks, call center software systems give agents all the tools they need to help customers, while giving managers complete visibility into department activities, agent performance, and service quality.

If your company is looking to purchase a call center package, a new resource is available to you: to help you find the software that is right for your company, the editors at Business-Software.com have compiled a list of the best vendors in the industry.  The comprehensive Top 10 Call Center Vendors whitepaper is designed to help you build your “short list” and make an informed purchasing decision. Read more »

The Business Software Advisor
You ask the questions, and our resident software guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question:  I’m thinking of transitioning my customer service into a virtual call center.  If I go virtual, how can I best manage the performance of my remote agents?  

A:  Agent management is a challenging function, especially within virtual contact center environments. Supervisors often find it difficult to evaluate the performance of customer service representatives who don’t reside in the same physical location, or to provide them with the kind of constructive feedback they need to do their jobs effectively. In some cases, remote agents may also lack access to the information they require to properly answer questions and address issues.

Today’s call center software solutions are designed to address these issues.  The features of these software packages enable managers to accomplish better agent management in virtual contact centers.  Read more »

Global Shop Solutions, the nation’s largest privately-held ERP software system provider for the manufacturing industry, recently introduced its Global Application Builder (GAB), an affordable programming tool which allows users to customize Global Shop’s ERP system to fit their needs. 

According to Global Shop’s press release, “GAB is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) language built from the ground-up to integrate with Global Shop Solutions’ One-System ERP Solutions.

Unlike other customization tools in the industry, GAB allows both front-end and business logic customizations without impact to the core system. System integrity and upgrade migration are not compromised, and users are able to make functionality changes without waiting for a customized option to be built or for a system update.” Read more »

The old adage of “the customer is always right”, coined in 1909 by Harry Gordon Selfridge, is becoming less realistic for businesses today.  The customer cannot always be “king”, even when a business fails to live up to its part of a buyer-seller relationship and when a customer suffers for no fault of his.  Abrasive customers, particularly those who are eventually allowed to benefit from their antics, often get better treatment than customers who are willing to put up with some valid discomfort. This can cause resentment amongst employees. In fact, companies are now discovering that putting their employees first often results in an increase in customer service standards. Read more »