5 Basic Addons to 2.0 Enable your CRM Product Deployment

Everyday we read tons of content on how there are new and improved CRM products out there that leverage Web2.0 and Social Networking. Now while that sounds great and more power to that movement, in reality there are enterprises out there that have deployed or signed contracts (in the case of SaaS) for existing CRM systems and moving overnight or in a short period to a new social CRM application might not be an option.

The other day someone asked me if they were to Web 2.0 enable their existing CRM deployment or try to make it more social where would they start. So here's my Top 5 list of Web 2.0 capabilities and social applications that can be leveraged to make it happen. Before I jump into the list wanted to do a quick definition level check.

Web 2.0 to me is a set of capabilities or application building paradigms that enable products to be more interactive, intuitive, collaborative and social. Which leads me to what are social apps.

Social applications to me are applications that leverage atleast one if not all of the following 3 areas.
- Leverage social networks either public or private as the basis of the application.
- Leverage the power existing networks like Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn etc
- Provide social interaction and collaboration capabilities like Wikis, Blogs, forums (I know they sound outdated, but are very prevalent to the social aspect), micro-messaging etc

Another point I'd like to highlight here is that a lot of the CRM 2.0 related capabilities we've seen or worked with operate on the edge of existing CRM products so adding them on for value add is very non-intrusive from an integration perspective.

Top 5 Basic Addons to 2.0 Enable your CRM Product Deployment

1. Widgets, Gadgets
Widgets or Gadgets are very engaging but lightweight slices of existing applications that reside on your desktop or aggregator page (like iGoogle) and usually serve a single but critical purpose of providing you updates about a certain information domain or quick access to certain application

2. RSS/Atom
3. Mashups
4. Wikis, Blogs
5. Mobile
   

Userplane says BB's are still alive and kickin in the 2.0 world

BBS I would say is the grandfather of most social media applications of today .. much before FB or LN or Geocities or IM or IRC there were bulletin board systems (phew suddenly I feel old). Anyone could start them (well initially only a few privileged admins hosting them on their servers could conrol them ... but it changed over time), people could join them, there were conversations and threads, later came the presence and rankings as well.

So today when I saw that :) userplane is taking the good ol BB's or forums to a whole next level with Flex/Flash it intrigued me. What place would they have in todays microblogging, wiki world.

Well to me, Twitter of today is somewhat the forums + email alerts that I used to receive in the past. I would follow forums, folks would follow my forums we would have conversations and short bursts as posts (maybe not exactly 140 characters .. but short enough).

I think userplane is on to something exciting, by combining their latest beefed up forums with IM and other products theyre feeding a market that is currently reaching a instant fatigue. To me forums always represented the balance between realtime and archived.

Enterprise Social Media in Action

Recently came across this interesting post that lists 35+ examples of corporate social media in action.

While there are many interesting examples about things like blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook being used in the corporate world, the one that intrigued me the most was the one from HSBC.

"HSBC built the HSBC Business Network to connect entrepreneurs using blogs, videos and forums."
Most-Networked-Executives

National Geographic has the most innovative one where they are using Google Lively.

National Geographic uses Google’s new virtual world, Lively, to bring people together around its new show, LA Hard Hats.

A quick analysis indicates that 25+ of the 35 example enterprises are into blogging in a big way with community building and Twitter second and third. While there were some mentions of videos and Facebook and others the vast majority were using blogs as their main social media vehicle.

Maybe cause blogs are the easiest to get off the ground, have a conversation (if you allow comments) and keep fresh.

Another one that I'd like to add to the list is Oracle Mix, its a community building or social tool that allows customers to connect, share ideas and have a conversation with Oracle.

Hey SaaS where's my backup generator

Backup generators is one thing that surely comes to mind going through the latest round of SaaS and SaaS platform related access problems this time with Google Apps.

Google Apps Hit by Prolonged Gmail Access Problem
Amazon Down For An Hour And Counting (Updated)
Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It
Downed Salesforce systems slow Europe and US

With all the talk these days about cloud computing and how everything needs to be moved into the sky (err sorry cloud) I wonder where it would leave enterprises with large scale outages. Maybe that's where the hybrid - fail over model of SaaS with OnPremise replication plays a strategic role. Now one can argue that the cost might be prohibitive for smaller organizations and it would involve a number of factors like criticality of application * duration of outage * impact to business etc.

The most common real world analogy that I've seen repeated over and over again from SaaS offerrings is about the utility model and how everyone today gets their power from a single vendor who works on all the infrastructure, operations and issues. While we the consumer provide a per unit usage fee and forget about the rest. Would you run something critical like a general hospital by solely relying on the power grid? Why hospitals, these days it comes down to very small retail organizations as well who have their own battery or diesel powered backup devices to withstand outages and keep business running.

Well here are some of my observations around the power grid and SaaS analogy and maybe its a black box of opportunities for a number of vendors who might not currently be in the SaaS platform provider race.

- If we look at the maturity curve of the power industry, SaaS is a long way from it.
- While there might be one front face vendor for an area ( like a PG&E) there are a number of up and down stream vendors who make the entire delivery happen.
- There will be a lot of mergers and consolidations in the SaaS space if the power industry is any indicator.
- The likelihood of a large number of ancillary offerings coming up around the space that offer backup products and backup strategies is high. Its akin to the diesel generator industry.
- As consolidation will occur and single vendors per geo's or verticals will appear it will spawn a whole an entire industry segment of vendors manufacturing devices that feed from the power lines like the electric devices of today.

Though its a little unclear who will be the electric company vs the backup generators vs the device manufacturers (the Westinghouses, GE's of todays world). One thing is certain that if SaaS/SaaS Platform is to be successful in large enterprises there will have to be backup generators ... most likely onsite near to the delivery end point ... it will have to keep storing information or juice enough to make it a swift and viable backup in case of large scale disruptions or outages.