aheadCRM

After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with  Jon Ferrara  again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course,  Nimble . As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in 1990. Jon is also a very vocal advocate of sales and marketing being first of all “human to human”, something that he claims that most CRM systems are not good at. Consequently, he dubs these systems as “Customer Reporting Systems” as they do not excel at helping salespeople giving a good look at the persons they interact with but are more focused on reporting. Being in the CRM world for a long time myself I cannot really disagree with him about this fact itself; we might have a discussion on what CRM overall is and why it went the (wrong) way it took. Some thoughts on what I think CRM is and how Nimble stands in this, along with some thoughts on how to go ahead with Nimble will come below … Historically CRM systems require a lot of data entry. Th

Salesforce  acquires  DemandWare. Lots has been written about the acquisition itself, so I will not comment on the fact itself. Instead I will ponder about implications on Microsoft. After all Microsoft is the remaining of the big CRM players that does not have an ecommerce platform of its own. Oracle acquired ATG in 2010. SAP's engagement in ecommerce culminated in the 2013 acquisition of Hybris, after having Internet Sales Solutions since 1996 or so, keywords for the connoisseurs are ISA or WCEM (and I will not mention any R/3 transaction codes here ... ). That leaves Microsoft. All other players I would position in another league - which doesn't mean that they are bad solutions. With ATG, Hybris, and Demandware the major independent platforms are taken, too; with the exception of Intershop, maybe. That is, if one assumes that IBM doesn't intend to sell off its Websphere. Microsoft pursuing a cloud strategy with their own infrastructure doe