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| Azure Blue Photo by Karim Manjra on Unsplash |
The News
This is not about the
colour of hope (which is blue, at least, if you are a German, like me), but
about the long pending final migration of Nimble to Azure. The company announced
on May 22 that it has successfully migrated its leading SaaS Social Sales application
from Amazon Web Services to Azure.
According to the press
release this migration was accomplished in less than four weeks without impact
on Nimble customers or, as the press release stated “without a hitch”.
With this move Nimble
can now “tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem
to scale”. According to the press release the company reports that, Microsoft
being “a global Nimble reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office
365, demand for the easy-to-use CRM for small workgroups is surging”.
Then there are two further
interesting pieces covered in the press release.
For one: with this
move Nimble also “accelerates the delivery of its upcoming 5.0 release using
the Azure Platfrom as a Servce (...) and by integrating Common Data Services,
Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow”. Nimble 5.0 shall deliver a “company wide team
relationship manager that unifies contacts from siloed departments in sales,
marketing, customer service, and accounting for Office 365 and G Suite users”.
The release of Nimble 5.0 is targeted for June 2019.
Second, Nimble emphasizes
on the power of ecosystems by putting a spotlight on Nimble being the only ISV
on Microsoft’s CSP Cloud Solution Provider marketplace that uses CSP to build a
global distribution channel. Nimble does this by first helping to transform the
resellers so they can transform their customers more easily and knowledgeable. “Partners
reselling third-party solutions like Nimble with Office 365 can take advantage
of solution bundles entirely integrated within Microsoft’s provisioning and
transaction system”.
Nimble states that to
date nearly 500 CSPs are using Nimble internally.
This approach helps resellers
to transform from being sellers of products, functions and features, to
becoming sellers of business solutions based upon Office 365.
The Bigger Picture
From its origins
Nimble is a solution for small businesses that targeted at replacing the Inbox
as the company “CRM” system. I put CRM in quotes as the term gets increasingly
confused with Sales Force Automation (SFA). Nimble is an SFA system.
But this is not the
real point.
The point being that by
moving to Azure, Nimble now is prepared to address larger teams, too, and is
therefore moving up the ladder a few notches.
At the same time, the
CRM market has morphed from an applications market to a platform and ecosystems
market with four strong infrastructure players: Alibaba, AWS, Google, Microsoft,
in alphabetic order. To read more about what a platform is, refer to my last
year’s but still current article.
In my Clash of Titans series of posts I have also discussed
these four players.
At the same time there
are software vendors striving for winning dominance in this platform market.
There are the tier one vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. I
covered these four here
and here.
And then there are a number of smaller players, notably Zoho and Freshworks
that have the ability to undercut and disrupt the tier one vendors as they have
the advantage of scaling up from an SMB market as opposed to being in the need
to scale down from an enterprise market. And in between we have players like BPM
or Pega, to name but two (I apologize to all the other ones that I didn’t
mention. Contact me if you are interested).
A strong platform play
means being strong on the four dimensions
· Technical Platform, covering IaaS and PaaS
· Ecosystem
· Insight
· Productivity
All these players have
recognized these dimensions and have different strengths and weaknesses towards
with they are playing their game.
My Analysis and PoV
After this brief
detour let’s get back to some more specifics.
As the CRM market has
morphed from an applications market to a platform market, the move of Nimble to
Azure is a strong case of a win-win-win situation for Microsoft, its channel
partners, and of course, Nimble. It provides help for Microsoft in an increasingly
saturated enterprise market while a large number of SMBs literally still runs
on Excel and E-Mail. Microsoft Dynamics is fairly hard to implement – as every
enterprise scale CRM system is. With the help of Nimble the entry barrier goes down
by first having a very easy-to-implement system that then can naturally grow
into MS Dynamics, e.g. by using a pre-customized version from Nimble.
At the same time,
Microsoft becomes a strong player at the lower end of the SMB market by virtue
of the ecosystem it created and runs. As Office applications are run throughout
the world, this can potentially create a strong barrier for the other players,
including the ones that still focus on the SMB market.
As a side effect,
Microsoft gets more application load onto Azure, which is the currency of the
IaaS market.
Channel partners can
grow on two dimensions. At the minimum, they have another arrow in their quiver.
But by being smart they can convert themselves from mere tool vendors to
business solution vendors by providing bundled solutions that utilize the
strength of Azure and important apps like Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, and Common
Data Services. By using the software themselves, they can lend credibility to
this concept. The beauty of this is, that the ecosystem partners help each
other grow, therefore growing the ecosystem as a result. This is a prime example
of what makes an ecosystem strong.
As for Nimble, it is
obvious. More partners using the software means more users. More partners
selling it means the potential of exponential growth.
With a deep
integration into the Office 365 stack and nifty tools like the sidebar that can
get used almost anywhere to create or update a Nimble record Nimble has the
serious ability to become sticky. It adds immense value to the users and I am
constantly surprised that the other vendors do not have something comparable –
apart from possible concerns about GDPR-like regulations.
It worked before. As
Jon doesn’t get tired to say he is following the same strategy that made his earlier
venture Goldmine so successful: Build a solution that users want and integrate
it deeply into the Microsoft stack. Grow from there.
I do not see a reason
why it should not work again.
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