Archive for May, 2009

I recently came across a good posting from Daryl Plummer at Gartner titled Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both!.  This article highlights the opportunity as well as issues related to an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) migrating to the cloud. It points out that “the vast majority of ISVs will have a very difficult time” taking advantage of the opportunity that a move to the cloud may offer them.

Why? According to the article, “It is not enough to just cloud-enable your software. You still have to deliver it as a service and that is simply not the business of most ISVs. So, you might have to change.”  Further, “some software vendors will either change their business entirely, or go out of business if cloud computing becomes the mainstream norm for delivery of systems.”

We agree. We at Navatar have been helping several ISVs (large and small), that have an existing On-Premise business, “cloud-enable” their products on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform-as-a-service.  We find that, not surprisingly, most ISVs are convinced that simply migrating their product to a cloud platform would turn them into a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider.  Since they do not understand the change required to shift from a product-based to a service-based model, their Cost/Benefit analysis for the effort is often flawed. As a result, they are able to SaaS-enable their product, but they struggle to make money on it.

For more on this subject, download a whitepaper that we recently wrote, at http://navatargroup.com/WhitePaper.html. You will learn about the experiences of ISVs such as Thomson-Reuters and CODA as well as opinions from Deloitte Consulting experts. The whitepaper is free.

Alok Misra

“No one’s social (yet),” says CRM Magazine’s Marshall Lager in the June edition. In other words, based on a study by ES Research, social media isn’t a big factor in closing B-to-B sales … yet.

But, it’s clear that going “social” is the new bandwagon to jump on.

Below Marshall’s article there’s a big excerpt from The Facebook Era by Clara Shih, the head of social media alliances and product strategy at salesforce.com. The full (and really long) title of her book is, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

According to one reviewer on Amazon, (Adam Smith,Bainbridge Island, WA), “The Facebook Era is a bleeding edge guide to how social networking portals such as Facebook can give astute businesses a leg up.”

We know a trend we see one. The “no software” folks are leading the charge into social media CRM selling.

Expect a tidal wave of new sales books coming out with titles like Strategic Conceptual Facebook Selling for Complex Sales.

Seriously though, we have just downloaded Shih’s book onto our Kindle2 and look forward to reading it during the commute home from Wall Street tonight.

Have a great day!

Allan Siegert

Will Google’s cloud-based email platform eventually kill MS office? We don’t know, but companies have surely started looking at Google’s platform more closely. Leena Rao of Techcrunch points out in her article at http://tcrn.ch/1rg that Google struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce of about 30,000 internet-using employees. We already know about Genentech adopting the Google Cloud platform for 20,000 users.

It will take some time before large companies start replacing MS Office. However as third parties create more commercial products in the Cloud that are tightly integrated with Google Gmail, docs, calendar etc, we may see more organizations considering the switch from Office to the Google platform. We will be testing the waters soon with Navatar’s Financial Services products for Force.com, taking advantage of the tight partnership between Google and salesforce.com. 

Stay tuned!

Alok Misra

Placement Agents have been in the news a lot recently and some of the stories haven’t been particularly friendly to the profession. Now, there’s some good news – a product that will make their jobs easier.

The product is designed to:

Manage prospective clients (both sell side and buy side)
Manage sell and buy side relationships
Manage fund sales
Conduct Due Diligence on Funds (Fund Managers)
Quickly and easily generate client reports and client metrics (dashboards)
Track CRM activity including calls, meetings and emails Mass mailings

Navatar Group has built this product on top of the force.com platform (it is 100% native to the salesforce.com programming). We are long-time salesforce.com partners headquartered in New York (44 Wall Street). We specialize in financial markets (hedge funds, fund of funds, mutual funds and private equity).

Allan Siegert

During a late afternoon conversation, the CFO of a Private Equity firm tells us what starts off easily quickly becomes like a complicated Russian novel. Toss in lots of emails and attachments and it really becomes headache inducing. Especially when you have to create reports.

“You have to track who you talked to when and what you talked about. Later, are those people you talked to still interested in investing or not? And, ultimately track what they chose to invest in or not and as what entity and in what fund.”

Helping you easily keep all this straight is the problem we solve for essentially the price of a daily cup of coffee (we are talking about the one we used to buy across the street at Starbucks on Wall Street, not the lower priced McDonalds in Westport, CT). Navatar’s Private Equity is built on the salesforce.com platform so all you need to access your data is a browser. Of course, seeing is believing. We are always happy to give a quick demo so please don’t hesitate to ask.

Allan Siegert

Sometimes we get criticized in the salesforce.com world about not highlighting all the good things that Navatar does. Yes, we are shy at times. So this time, let us draw your attention to some good things being said about us – a recent one related to one of our most popular products, the Private Equity CRM for salesforce.com, which continues to ride high. It was great to receive a glowing review from Glenn Oken, one of the most seasoned Private Equity pros and Managing Director at Mangrove Equity Partners, LLC, a Tampa-Florida based lower middle market private equity fund. Here is what Glenn had to say:

Thank you Glenn. It is great to have you as a customer.

Oh yes, and to learn more about Navatar Private Equity for salesforce.com, or to see a demo please visit:

http://navatargroup.com/industry_solutions_private_equity.html

Alok Misra.

We liked the way VentureWire said it – “noteworthy for who isn’t included…” The lead paragraph from their story is below and pretty much says it all.

Allan Siegert

Cloud Standards Effort Could Turn Into A Dustup
VentureWire, May 04, 2009

“A trade organization whose members include IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and a laundry list of other tech companies announced this week that it has formed a group to create standards for a way of accessing information over the Internet known as “cloud computing.” But the new effort is just as noteworthy for who isn’t included: Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and other Internet companies….”

We have always been cynical about mobile CRM.

Maybe it’s a left over feeling from the early mobile stock market devices we sold for Reuters … they were the size and weight of a brick and if you moved too far from a window, they blanked out – of course, that was about a decade ago.

We have been playing with mobile CRM on a Blackberry and it’s surprisingly good. Okay, we are not an early adopter of this salesforce.com mobile but we now like it a lot. You can see data or add data regardless of connectivity. That’s because the application and the data are loaded on your device. So, for example, you can quickly add a meeting report during an airline flight. The data synchronizes immediately when you land and are connected again.

The only problem is that we have a Pearl (8130). That’s the one with the really small screen (about the size of two postage stamps) – so, we have to carry a magnifying glass to see our accounts and tasks. Maybe this is an excuse to upgrade to a new phone.

Allan Siegert