If there’s one thing that you can state with assurance, its that the sun will come up…tomorrow….bet your…oh, wait, wrong blog post. That was the Tony Awards. Â Let me start again. If there’s one thing that you can state with assurance, its that software vendors have realized that social customers and “social employees” – usually the same people – are here to stay and that they have to respond to them.
The response of a software vendor, however, is unlike the response of any other category of seller in the world. They make the tools and they make them often in anticipation of a market that isn’t necessary either there or theirs. Â Meaning that they are making hammers and nails based on the types of houses that they think customers will be building and they try to sell those tools to either the people who are going to build the houses or those that are going to live in them. Â So it is often a calculated guess as to what the necessary tools are going to be and who the right audience is for them based on what they think the audience is going to do – maybe, possibly, hopefully. They take far greater risks than their potential customers do, in a lot of ways. But then, that’s the nature of their business.
I say this because there is a MASSIVE influx of software tools that are being called Social CRM into the marketplace and honestly, most of them aren’t that. I’m not saying they are bad software, they just don’t meet the criteria that I would say meets the standards for calling it Social CRM. Does that mean anything? Well, the concept does. Â I can’t say that my criteria do.
That said, I want to take a fast look at what enterprise software providers are “doing” social CRM or at least doing the things that they are supposed to do to meet future market demand. Â Honestly, the current market demand for Social CRM software per se is not much. Gartner sees it as a $1 billion component of the $16 billion CRM market by 2012. Â Do I? Nah. Â I think it will be smaller in 2012 but that’s more based on anecdotal observation, not scientific methodology. But then again, Gartner saw it in 2010 as a $1 billion subcomponent of CRM for 2011 too. Soooooo…..you decide. Or not.
Here’s a quick take at the market movers:
Salesforce.com – Two weeks ago in Washington D.C. salesforce.com (they still use the lower case version of their name which is why I use it. I think.), they announced a commitment to the Social Enterprise – probably the first vendor to announce a product-focused commitment to it as a whole. (see below for IBM to see what I mean). They’ve done a lot of it through acquisition – including the major acquisition of Radian6 and the “more-significant-than-I-thought-it-was-at-the-time” acquisition of Heroku, though, with some admitted prejudices, I think that Radian6′s acquisition was the most important one that salesforce ever made. What they now are attempting to put into place, though with the marketing component still weak, is a complete social enterprise suite that is built around flexible customization but with enough “out of the box” Â that it would be a good fit for any company. They are also moving away from the “just large enterprise” strategy they’ve had for the past 2-3 years and toward a “we can fit all sizes” strategy and a highly flexible framework from their more rigid Apex-only proprietary framework. Â Do I love that fact? Kinda, sorta. Â I don’t think that companies care as much as the vendors think they do about open source vs. proprietary as long as the applications they need enable what they need to be done. Â A.k.a. do the job. Â That said, giving the customers the ability to customize and author in any language but still inside your platform (Force.com) is a wise move and one that will ultimately serve a company that is testing the “social enterprise” waters, well. Radian6′s acquisition gives salesforce what can be fully integrated in all their applications – a social listening and action platform that can also extend itself to incorporate other analytic programs for the back end. That alone solves a big chunk of salesforce’s prior limitations – Chatter’s internal focus – and weaknesses – strong analytics capabilities.
SAP – With the release of SAP Sales on Demand, SAP has finally shown that it can play in the SaaS/cloud world and provide social capabilities that are as powerful as any of those already out there. They have fully integrated activity streams and the ability to respond – though more from the standpoint of internal collaboration among individuals and groups, though you can monitor and act on Twitter streams from external sources too. The next iteration will incorporate InsideView, the leading sales intelligence service so that the sales people will have access to structured and unstructured G2 to support their specific needs when it comes to closing deals or competitive advantage. Within CRM 7.0, their latest release, they’ve incorporated Twitter analysis and integration with their customer service applications – the analytics (sentiment analysis) being driven by their Business Objects Insight product. The results of the sentiment analysis will trigger workflows and automatically route the appropriate messages to the appropriate resources for action. Â These are solid first steps, but they are first steps. The irony here is that SAP is probably the most progressive when it comes to
Oracle - The thing with Oracle is that they are a bit hard to peg. They have their Social CRM applications which seem to be undergoing a massive overhaul that are based, not so much on Social CRM, as internal collaboration. For example, Sales Library is a product that transcends a typical document management product by a long shot. It gives the sales person not only the ability to find the presentations/documents that can aid in the sale, but to access and provide comments, rankings, ratings and some analysis of which presentations, given the history of the deals that they are associated with are the likely best presentations to build on for whatever current opportunity is in question. Â That’s slick, with the social capabilities provided a great way of accessing the shared knowledge of the employees and the algorithms running an impartial (somewhat) source of information so that better judgments can be made by the sales folks. But what is the most intriguing is that Oracle has fully integrated collaboration into Fusion so that it isn’t treated as a separate service or application. Its just there. Â The only caveat to all of this is that Fusion applications were supposed to be out in January general release and they weren’t. That concerns me. But what I saw with Fusion integration and collaboration was pretty amazing. Now they just have to get it out there.
Microsoft – Microsoft has been somewhat behind the curve when it comes to social features in their enterprise applications including CRM. They have a good product, but the social side lacks somewhat. Very promising is the recent integration done by Exact Target’s CoTweet subsidiary…or is it division…which is a full integration of social profiles and transaction data made easily accessible and highly visually satisfying for each and every customer in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 database. Microsoft also promises that they are going to focus more on social in the next iterations of Dynamics CRM but we’ll see. That said, it could be that they are just changing their strategy somewhat. I have this theory, see, that with the purchase of Skype (which cleared the FTC’s regulatory hurdles easily earlier today)Â and with the vast improvement of Microsoft Phone 7 Â over prior mobile operating systems they have released and the quality of Microsoft Azure as a key cloud provider, that they are moving toward a serious, serious drive for Unified Communications – and owning that. CRM becomes less ambitious at that point but at the same time, remains an important product in their hybrid cloud/on premise strategy (which dovetails with SAP, Oracle etc. but not salesforce.com) and still is one of their newer enterprise cash cows – meaning social remains an important focus for them and one they have to move quickly on. CoTweet integration is an excellent start because of the quality of the application but it isn’t sufficient unto itself.
CDC Software Pivotal – I’m incorporating these guys because they’ve actually not only produced a real  Social CRM product that is “social crm definition approved” (kidding, okay? No such designation. Really. I swear.) but are moving to providing all their products in the cloud as well as on premise.  This was a ground-breaking (and surprising coming from Pivotal who had pretty much disappeared from the scene for about five years) product because it was the first to fully integrate external social feeds with CRM databases and allow for actions taken. That means for example, opening up a support ticket or opportunity from a specific twitter feed and triggering workflows to get the info to the appropriate person and incorporate it into the customer database.  They did it before anyone else did and they put themselves squarely back on the map. Deservedly so.These guys are serious contenders – at least for the upper end of the midmarket. If not greater.
IBM – The reason I mentioned them and salesforce.com in the sorta same breath was that they are taking different paths to the social enterprise. Salesforce is servicing the social enterprise; IBM is becoming the social enterprise. At Lotusphere in February of this year, IBM announced that they are going to spend what will amount over time to oodles of money (note my scientific precision here. I’ve done the math), on transforming everything about themselves, ranging from culture to operations to compensation structure to employee empowerment to become a social enterprise (doing this on their 100th birthday when they became a $100 billion company too).  They expect to involve all 400,000 of their employees, empowering 50,000 by the end of 2011. They have a long term vision with short term objectives that they are diligently working toward. That said, they are spending a lot of time improving their knowledge of Social CRM, not one their historic strong suits. They however have some excellent folks such as Carolyn Baird handling their CRM thought leadership (and more broadly, Research Director Eric Lesser) via the Institute for Business Value (I think they are an excellent research institution) , so, I would imagine, they will meet the challenge and start becoming a serious player in Social CRM. I’ll be watching.
I’m not covering a lot of the others who are involved, mostly because I don’t have the time and a couple of them – Marketo and InsideView (along with Oracle and SAP) are on the panel that I’m moderating on the state of social sales and marketing technology tomorrow at 2:30pm in room 309 of the Hynes Convention Center, so I don’t want to give it all away. Come out and hear them. Its a great crew. We have Anthony Lye who runs CRM for all of Oracle, Bill Hou, a VP who handles product development at SAP and is largely responsible for SAP Sales on Demand; Heidi Tucker, the VP who built the key partnerships that have driven a lot of InsideView’s success as a sales intelligence provider  - make that THE sales intelligence provider – social and traditional; and finally, Paul Albright, Chief Revenue Officer, long time industry veteran, driving Marketo, a marketing software provider to a leading position in the industry.  Come see them, talk to them, challenge them. If I’m doing my job as moderator, I’ll ask no question. You’ll ask them all.
Do me a favor, help me do my job.
Nov 4th, 2011 |
