Jim Ward - President, BrainSell

What’s a Hybrid CRM Solution?

It’s the best of all worlds. Hosted and on-premise customer relationship management software. In fact — it’s the new market trend.

If you’re looking for are looking for the benefits of a hosted CRM solutions, such as low IT resource requirements and low cost of ownership, but you’re concerned about the security of your data (and you should be) since recent phishing scams have attacked some of the most well know pure hosting solutions, then a hybrid CRM solution is probably what you’ll require.

A hybrid CRM solution provides the ability to go with a purely hosted option, however it will also allow you to purchase the software and install the web solution on premise. Pure web solutions, like SageCRM, are easy to maintain (no client installs), can be maintained remotely by a business partner, and the total cost of ownership is so much lower than a monthly hosting fee. Do the math and you’ll likely find that in 2 years of hosting fees you’ve probably paid for the purchased system 2X or more depending on the size of your implementation. The cost of hosted CRM is one of the reasons why hybrid CRM is fast becoming the market trend.

By Chuck Schaeffer - CEO, Aplicor

This post is the second in a series which highlights fundamental differences among SaaS CRM applications.

The majority of hosted CRM software publishers have yet to deliver market specific business solutions for routinely recognized market segments. For the most part, on-demand solutions still trail the media and marketing hype, the industry is still in its infancy and many hosted software publishers view the customer market as a single, giant green field selling opportunity.

This lack of market segmentation is not to be unexpected when compared with previous application software evolutions. When the earliest mainframe and host-based software applications became ready for customer acquisition, the primary customer targeting was not based on company size, geography or industry, but instead on who could afford the cost of procurement. With the release of client/server business applications in the early 90’s, the vendors’ targeting was across the board from start-ups forecasting big growth or small clients desiring to upgrade from LAN-based business software to the largest of companies seeking to replace rigid and monolithic mainframe applications.
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Chuck Schaeffer - CEO, Aplicor

It seems that when surveying the software as a service (SaaS) business applications market, surveyors often either feel there are too many similar vendor solutions or believe that there are still many market voids. I suspect the differences stem at least in part from the depth of the particular survey.

If you only look at the SaaS CRM or ERP markets from a broad perspective, there can appear to be a number of seemingly like business software solutions. However, if a deeper investigation continues, the primary differences among the SaaS solutions become apparent and the market voids become visible.

My view and investigation of the SaaS business software market shows strategic differences among SaaS vendor solutions in seven primary areas – architecture, customer target market, software scope or breadth, software depth, hosted delivery, information security and continuous uptime capabilities.

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