Congratulations to the destinationCRM 2011 CRM Market Leaders

Interested in the evolving CRM market? Planning on attending Dreamforce this month?

If you answered yes to either question, you’re going to want to take the time to read the 10th Annual CRM Market Leader award summary over on destinationCRM.

Here’s a summary of this year’s winners by category:

• Enterprise CRM Suite:  Salesforce.com
• Midmarket CRM Suite: Salesforce.com
• Small Business CRM Suite: Salesforce.com
• Sales Force Automation: Salesforce.com
• Incentive Management: Xactly
• Marketing Solutions: Marketo
• Business Intelligence: IBM (Cognos)
• Data Quality: Informatica
• Open Source CRM: Sugar CRM
• Consultancies: Innoveer

The magazine also announced their CRM Influential Leaders. They are:

• Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO – A Ubiquitous Presence
• Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO – The Deal Maker
• Esteban Kolsky, Thinkjar Founder and Principal – An Analyst’s Analyst
• Andrew Mason, Groupon Founder and CEO – A Group Leader
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Social Founder and CEO – The Social Butterfly
• Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn President and CEO – A Public Statement

Congratulations to this year’s winners! They are both impressive lists.  See you at Dreamforce!

Related articles

• Importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Oracle Rolls To $37 With Push From InQuira (blogs.forbes.com)
• Salesforce Irons it Out: 21st Century Social Enterprise Certified (zdnet.com)

D&B360: Delivering Data as Service

In this video, Tom Carlock from D&B introduces D&B360 and Data as a Service (DaaS). He also talks about the built-in data integration capabilities that Informatica Cloud delivers as part of the solution.

Related Articles

• D&B Launches D&B360TM, Expanding Data Leadership into Data-as-a-Service Solutions (eon.businesswire.com)

D&B360: Informatica Cloud Inside

Here’s  a quick video of Tom Carlock from D&B talking about the Informatica Cloud capabilities embedded within D&B360.
http://www.twitvid.com/player/GKYDT

Getting Ready for 2011 Predictions

Last year, when it comes to cloud integration, Informatica made the following prediction:

“Cloud Data Integration will eclipse both security and availability to be the defining capability that drives Cloud Computing success.”

Well, after a busy year which saw IBM acquire CastIron and Dell acquire Boomi, clearly we weren’t alone in our thinking. I’ll post some 2011 predictions shortly (kind of busy with a little event called Dreamforce at the moment, amongst other things), but I wanted to point you to a great post from Mr. CRM, Paul Greenberg: Looking Back at 2010 – In 2010. When it comes to cloud / CRM integration, he makes the following points:

“Companies are looking to integrate to provide best of breed solutions since most companies – technology companies that is – are realizing that they can’t do it alone.”

and

“But the social vendors like Lithium, Radian6 etc. are all realizing that they need to integrate with traditional CRM systems and InsideView continued its relentless drive to integrate with everything including the basil plants that are growing inside varying foodies homes – and they’ve been a happy success accordingly with integrations to most of the CRM standards out there.”

Be sure to check out the full post here.

Interactive History of CRM Software

As we get ready for Dreamforce 2010, I thought I’d share an interesting interactive CRM Software History posted on the Software Advice blog. According to the author, “the timeline includes 18 key events that have shaped the CRM software industry over the last 30 years. It’s a quick way to understand the context of current events in the industry.”

It’s a work in progress, but a few quick observations:

• Anyone remember sales.com?
• What about Upshot?
• No mention of Siebel OnDemand or now Oracle OnDemand
• No mention of many of the Salesforce innovations post 1999:  AppExchange, Force.com, Apex Code, $1B in revenues, Chatter….
• Is Social CRM ready to be included or is it not quite ready for prime time?
• Sweet picture of Tom Siebel in 1993
• Speaking of Siebel, the positioning of their acquisition by Oracle is pretty harsh:

“With little light at the end of the tunnel, Siebel agrees to become the next addition to Oracle’s pile of acquired enterprise applications.”

What else is missing? What’s next? What are your thoughts? Accurate timeline or a bit of revisionist history?

You can view the CRM Software History timeline here.

A Cloud is Not an Island

I like what Eli Kohn, operations manager at BDB Payroll Service, has to say about the importance of cloud integration in this case study:

“From my perspective, you can’t derive maximum value from salesforce.com unless you also have Informatica Cloud. The combination of the two solutions has helped us up-level our customer service performance from a level two to a resounding level 10. Having salesforce.com without integration is like having a beautiful house on an island, but no way to get there. By leveraging Informatica Cloud to put our customer data under a single umbrella, we’re saving significant headcount, enabling our departments to better collaborate and accelerating our timeframe of getting things done in an effective and professional manner.”

You can read the full story here.

Informatica Cloud StrikeIron Phone Number Validation

Tired of bringing bad data into your CRM environment? Check out this new Informatica Cloud demo of the new StrikeIron plug-in for phone number validation:

Best of Both Worlds: Marc Benioff at Oracle OpenWorld

Here’s the presentation delivered by Marc Benioff at OpenWorld this week.

• “We are the cloud people!”
• “Clouds don’t come in a box!”

Jim Cramer on Salesforce.com…and an Art History Lesson

I haven’t watched this guy since he was blown up by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, but he provided an over-the-top introduction of salesforce.com for this Marc Benioff and I just had to share it here. Thanks to @CRMFYI for posting it on his great site Salesforce Video Channel.

CRM Account Synchronization in the Cloud

Based on the number of people who registered for the webinar and the attendance, clearly Account Synchronization is one of the top cloud integration challenges. Here’s how we defined the requirements:

• The need to load Accounts into Salesforce CRM  (Here we talked about the importance of data translation – “this is a mapping exercise.”)
• The need to load Contacts, associate them with Accounts, and maintain relationships (People often perform this task via Excel lookups, which can be difficult to set up and maintain.)
• The need to establish bi-directional synchronization between systems (Use cases include process-centric application integration and customer master data.)

We then reviewed the 5 potential ways that organizations are addressing this challenge today:

• Hand coding (Always the #1 competitor to a real data integration solution)
• Free tools (The Informatica Data Loader, for example,  is extremely popular with Salesforce.com customers. Here are some reasons to consider upgrading.)
• Outsourcing (There are benefits to having an SI manage data integration, but it should be in concert with a tool or platform.)
• On-Premise Tools for IT (I like this Informatica Perspectives post called Salesforce.com Integration – Inside Out or Outside In? What’s the right choice for you?)
• Cloud Services (Growing list of benefits for customers (rapid deployment, fewer resources, frequent upgrades, etc.) and ISVs (time to market, reduced development costs, etc.)

The rest of the webinar (which is available for viewing here) focused on demonstrations of how Informatica Cloud Services addresses the Account Sync challenge and customer examples. After lots of great questions, we made the following best practice recommendations:

• Don’t underestimate data loading (Take time to understand your data.)
• Don’t underestimate your data volumes (Ensure your data integration solution can scale.)
• Leverage external IDs to simplify integration (Bring over key IDs from on-premise objects.)
• Expect the unexpected (Aglity in a cloud-based integration solution is key.)

Here is the slideshare presentation:

Informatica Cloud Account Synchronization

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham.