Summary

Continue reading »]]> In response to: Part 1 | Part 2

I agree Geoff. Thanks for your thoughts. For the sake of conversation, consider the layman perspective… A contextual social collaboration platform and an xRM Platform both provide history and relevance. The difference is perception on the basis of how intuitive it is to identify relevant information once it has been made available. In both cases, the playing field is neutral because the behavior is expected to be “most recent first”. Social platforms are just recently introducing “most relevant first” – and I’m intentionally excluding that from this discussion as I haven’t seen anything indicative of success. In addition, the paradigm on both platforms for identifying situational relevance is to conduct a search. The social collaboration platform will be perceived as the more intuitive approach – and frankly I agree with this. Which leads me to my point…

What’s lacking in these tools is a real model to define contextually relevant information and an intuitive mechanism to retrieve it. The concept of tagging in both tools (a.k.a. Groups, Favorites, Likes, Collections, people, places, etc…) provides a generic mechanism but to your point – at what end? Searching is a painful paradigm… a business (like a brain) wishes to recall information, not find it. Every member of the organization desires to see things that are relevant to them and what it is they are doing. Today, the answer in both tools is hardly better than forum moderation, suggestive selling, etc… circa 2002… That is, we understand that tagging information is better for interactive indexing of relevant information but we haven’t actually figured out what to do with it beyond devising very expensive models with more attributes and more data to suggestive sell. I refer to suggestive selling loosely because the pattern applies across many other areas.

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So  – I just got a preview of Aaron Fukerson’s presentation at SugarCON.   I will not steal his thunder before his session – but holy toledo, was I impressed by it!

So….without any spoilers, here is the 30,000 ft summary:   …We all know how hard it is to take the tweets, blogs, forums, threads, likes, shares, and rich dynamic content….and turn them into a recognizable element or artifact for use in a business context.

Aaron and his team at Mindtouch have it figured out.

Go listen…5:05 pm at SugarCON 2011.  Track 4.

UPDATE 4/6/2011 4:11 PST >>>>>>>>>Spoiler alert!!!

He uploaded his presentation on slideshare before the event…heh heh heh

Continue reading »]]> So SugarCON 2011 is in its 2nd day….and its hard to believe that its over in 2 hours.  You will not find a more intense 48 hours of organized conference chaos anywhere else in Silicon Valley.

So…IBM and its pragmatic play with SugarCRM and LotusLive, definitely real, definitely NOT vapor, and definitely a winner.

Another winner?  Pardot.  Pardot.  Pardot.

Now this might seem like old news – but its pretty clear to me that either A) Pardot is having a lot of success working it way into the SugarCRM customer base, B) They view their SugarCRM partnership as strategic, and thus are investing aggressively in it, or C) A & B.

Either way, Pardot’s comprehensive (and well integrated offering) turbocharges SugarCRM in the area of Marketing Automation.  Flexible campaigns, DRIPS, analytics, tight data integration with Leads and Contacts in Sugar, a great UI integration with SugarCRM.

Levementum (my company) is not  a customer (or partner) of Pardot…but I’ve seen enough to buy the solution.  And after we figure it out (…we do “eat our own dog food” at Levementum), I have little doubt that Pardot is going to be a valuable complement to our SugarCRM practice offering.

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Day 1 at SugarCON 2011….and at any software conference or exposition, its easy to get carried away with the hyperbole and “vapor” of new product releases, new alliances, the latest “foo”-CRM idea.

There is one solution offering though, that appears to be the real deal, and I am betting is going to get traction…fast….and its the SugarCRM – Lotus Live Collaboration integration being touted by IBM and SugarCRM.

The short story is that LotusLive Meetings and LotusLive Documents are now integrated into SugarCRM…the details though spell out the power behind these integrations. LotusLive Meetings cleanly integrates into the framework of CRM activity that is cataloged and managed in SugarCRM’s world of tasks, meetings, calls, etc. Perhaps more impressively, LotusLive Documents provides a context sensitive (i.e. related to Opps, Accts, Contacts, explicitly) document management cloud, that fits cleanly into SugarCRM, and is accessible throughout the application.

I suppose its probably easiest to put it this way. Levementum sells a lot of SugarCRM….and from my perspective, its going to be fairly easy to position and sell the LotusLive offering on a large percentage of the deals we see. Perhaps the key thing here is that I don’t see this as a “risky add-on” that potentially is a headache in the long run. It works – and its got Big Blue behind it.

In any case – I’ll keep you posted on our LotusLive journey. In the meantime, take a look at the LotusLive demo on SugarCRM’s website: https://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/webcast/LotusLive

Continue reading »]]> Over the weekend, two of Levementum’s engineers spent 50 hours with 50 programmers for SugarCON Code Sprint.   These fantastic super-nerds spent 2 days working on innovations for the upcoming release of SugarCRM 6.2. The best news…they ran on Beta all weekend and in spite of all the cutting and chopping the 50 programmers did, they did not run into a single bug.  A shout out to Clint Oram, Lila Tretiak and the Engineering Squad at SugarCRM for a high quality beta….way to go Sugar!

All games aside, and there were plenty (beer pong anyone??), these programmers worked on the latest and greatest Sugar 6.2 and successfully created new modules and performance enhancers that will work into later versions of Sugar.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, and Clint Oram, Co-Founder and CTO of SugarCRM, have talked repeatedly to the partners over the last couple of days about how impressed they were with the results and the improvements that came out of that session.

Here at Levementum, we are constantly looking at the SugarCRM product, new improvements, and how we can collaborate with Sugar to make a smarter product for our customers.  We are excited to see the developments our guys helped create during the SugarCON Code Sprint.

Continue reading »]]> The goal of a CRM solution is to drive growth (i.e. revenue) and maximize efficiencies (i.e. profit) in business practices, processes, and relationship management (sales).  Should you have to pay a premium and be restricted on how you do this?  SugarCRM says NO!  This is why they are an open source product, why they allow you to try & sample their community edition solution for free, why they offer more offerings at each service level, and why they do it all at less than half the price of Salesforce.

SugarCRM’s Professional ready solution is $30 per month while Saleforce’s Enterprise solution is $125 per month and has FEWER KEY FEATURES! Why should your business pay more for less?  If you want to add those missing key features to Salesforce, you need to get out your wallet again because you will have to pay for the addition.  Wait, you want it customized…better pull that wallet back out.  THERE IS A BETTER WAY: SUGARCRM! They offer more at their Enterprise level, if there are additions you want to make you can select one from more that 5,700 FREE 3rd party add on applications, and since the code for SugarCRM and the application are provided to you, you can customize everything to meet your needs without paying more!

SugarCRM offers so much more, for so much less.  Is there really a comparison?

Continue reading »]]> SugarCRM’s Professional offering is equivalent to the Enterprise offering of Salesforce.  Salesforce’s “Professional” offering lacks basic sales force automation features which a professional CRM should have. 

Who wants to pay for a “professional”  CRM solution that won’t support  a professional sales force appropriately?

SugarCRM wants their customers to get the most out of their CRM solution which is why they offer flexibility and more options at every level.  If you don’t believe us…review the functional comparison chart above.

To learn more, contact us for our complete white paper and product comparison matrices!

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When it is time to implement a CRM solution, the ability to customize and integrate efficiently is always important.  SugarCRM’s complete flexibility allows you to use a SOAP or REST approach for your integrations and applications. Salesforce limits your integration methods and throughput (max/quotas) limiting a business’ integration, and deployment options.

Furthermore, is you build new modules, data objects, relationships or new fields, all of these are automatically enabled through the web service framework….with no additional work.

You build the module…its instantly available via web services!

The ability to use SOAP or REST creates options for integration that are limitless.  Additionally you can access your data via web services, or access via ODBC, JDBC, or a direct database connection.  This flexibility is critical to companies that want to access their data in more than one way.

On again, flexibility is the key to SugarCRM’s success over Salesforce.  For a company that wants choice and control of  how their CRM system is integrated with other key systems, SugarCRM is the best option…just ask your development team.

SugarCRM’s developer wiki is a great site that tells you everything you need to know about the integration framework that you get from the application.  Remember that these approaches and APIs are available in the On-Demand OR the On-Premise deployment scenarios.