Oh, and in the new year, I will be back with more interesting news on CRM as well (sorry for not doing so lately, I’ve been busy with my regular work, but I’m afraid I won’t have to be worried about that anymore), so stay tuned, and have a great, happy, awesome new year!

Earlier this week we reported that Zoho CRM has launced Zwitch, an aggressive marketing campaign directed at Salesforce.com’s clients to encourage them to migrate to Zoho CRM’s platform, promising them 80% savings in CRM-costs.

To follow up the story, we asked Zoho Director of Marketing Rodrigo Vaca (follow him on Twitter) to shed some light on the background of Zwitch. Although he refused to give us the exact number of customers Zoho has successfully lured since the campaign went live on July 21, the director assured us that Zoho has “aggressive investment and growth plans for the CRM arena”.

• What makes Salesforce clients so special that a dedicated program was designed to lure them to Zoho’s platform?
  
• From our point of view, two things make Salesforce customers ’special’ for this kind of a program. Firstly that they are already familiar with the SaaS model, and most importantly that they are paying an exorbitant amount of money for functionality they could get at a much better value.
  When you look at Salesforce’s installed base, their customers spend on average north of $18,000 a year on their CRM with Salesforce. In these uncertain financial times, we know they can get a much better deal: not only get a better price, but the same functionality and even more.

• Do you plan to go on designing similar programs targeting other CRM providers’ client base? If public, who’s next?
• Sure, we plan to do this in the future as well – not only Salesforce in the CRM space and not only for CRM – but for other Zoho products in general as well.

• How many new clients do you expect from the Zwitch program? Now that the program is live for more than a week, does Zwitch seem to meet the expectations?
• We are so far pleased with the performance. But remember our Zwitch program is of course a means to the end, not the end itself.

• The comparison highlighted in the press release compares Zoho’s Professional Edition with Salesforce’s Professional package. Are the two packages 100% equal in functionality?
• We believe that for the most part, both editions equally address the CRM needs customers have.

• Is Zoho CRM able to provide all the functionality offered by higher level Salesforce packages? Is Zoho’s Enterprise package equal to Salesforce’s Enterprise package? What about Salesforce.com’s Unlimited package?
• It is dangerous to compare based solely on names. That’s why we invite our customers to make a list of the current, and potential future requirements, and then see what edition fits them the best. But perhaps the most important part is: what good is it to have the most obscure CRM report, when you’re not covering in the basics?
  The recent Zoho CRM + Mail integration demonstrates this well. Not every salesperson has the need for complex bells and whistles that high-end (read: expensive) CRM providers offer to justify their prices, but every salesperson out there needs to have a easy-to-use CRM+Mail integration story.

• Do you consider individual pricing, individual product development or customization when talking to potential new clients, who came from Salesforce?
• Our CRM product directly addresses the needs that most customers have when “zwitching” from Salesforce.com. We also have a network of CRM professionals who provide customization services for those customers that might need some help. That said, we pride ourselves in being flexible and striving to meet our customers’ needs.

• How high is Zoho CRM priorized among other Zoho products concerning development?
• Right at the top. CRM is a very important space for us. Zoho CRM is one of our products with the most history and where we have invested the most for a long time. It also generates a big percentage of our revenue. You can be sure we are fully committed to the CRM space.
  

Earlier: Zwitch: Zoho luring Salesforce clients full throttle

Salesforce

Salesforce is a listed (NYSE:CRM) on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor. According to the company, Salesforce is market leading among on-demand CRM providers. In particular, Salesforce.com is involved in offering Cloud Computing services to industries and businesses of all sizes. The company uses Cloud Computing to give its customers access to online software, with minor implementation and no on-premise installation or maintenance of software or physical servers.

Salesforce offers 4 editions of its CRM solution ranging in price from $9/user/month (Group package) to $250/user/month (Unlimited package). For a full edition comparison chart, click here.

Salesforce has garnered and continues to collect several awards, most recently (as of Aug, 2009) Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud was named a winner in Software as a Service and Cloud Computing category at the 2009 Product Innovation Award. For a list of the company’s awards visit this site.
<a href=”http://finance.yahoo.com” mce_href=”http://finance.yahoo.com”>Yahoo! Finance</a><br/><a href=”http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM/” mce_href=”http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM/”>Quote for CRM/</a>

According to Wikinvest, Salesforce.com derived 91.4% of its 2008 revenue from subscription and support fees associated with cloud services. Salesforce.com has experienced a significant rise in customers with its 2009 customer base at 55,400 or a 35% increase from 41,000 in 2008. In addition, Salesforce.com customers are relatively evenly split across small business (less than 200 employees), medium sized businesses (200 employees to $1B in revenue) and large businesses (greater than $1B in revenues)

Founded in 1999 by former Oracle exec Marc Benioff, the San Francisco based Salesforce went public in 2004. Its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API and its AppExchange directory of on-demand applications pioneered in the development of enterprise platforms.

Salesforce has currently ~2,600 employees, some 55,000+ customers, over 900,000 subscribers and an estimated value of $110m.

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Executive Team

The executive management team at salesforce.com is comprised of:

• Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO
• Parker Harris, Executive Vice President, Technology
• George Hu, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Alliances
• Kenneth I. Juster, Executive Vice President, Law, Policy, and Corporate Strategy
• Graham Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
• Jim Steele, President, Worldwide Sales and Chief Customer Officer
• Polly Sumner, President, Global Services and Chief Adoption Officer
• Frank van Veenendaal, President, Worldwide Sales and Chief Sales Officer

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is the online hosted CRM solution of Zoho Corp (previously AdventNet), based in Pleasanton, California. Zoho CRM empowers organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management in a single business system. Zoho CRM is free for a maximum of 3 users, and its paid packages are deemed to be among the most affordable and cost effective CRM solutions on the web.

Zoho CRM’s feature modules include:

• Sales & Marketing
• Microsoft Outlook & Office plugin
• Inventory management
• CRM API to develop and implement third party applications
• Product customization
• Role-based security
• Sophisticated dashboards and reporting system

For details on each of the features visit Zoho CRM’s features page or Zoho CRM’s wiki site.

In addition to the free package, that maximizes the number of users in three, Zoho CRM offers two paid packages. The Professional Edition costs $12 per user per month, while the Enterprise Edition is $25/user/month. Both paid packages offer a free trial period of 15 days. To compare the features included in certain (paid and free) Zoho CRM packages, click here.

If you’re interested in Zoho CRM, you might want to follow its Twitter feed, visit the Zoho CRM lounge, try the demos that are already online or request a personalized demo for yourself.

About Zoho Corp

Zoho CRM’s parent company, Zoho Corp offers an array of online business tools for individuals and companies, including a fully fledged Office suite, a project management application, a web-based email service, an online marketplace to connect solution providers with organizations and others.

Zoho’s flagship office suite was launched in 2005, and the company’s registered user base has reached the 1,000,000 milestone in 2008.

At the moment Zoho has some 300 employees and and international network of resellers.

The new CRM application runs as a Java program under i OS, delivers Web- and Windows-based UIs, and provides close integration with the DB2 for i (DB2/400) database, as well as other Infor ERP applications. Instead of adapting the established Epiphany CRM application to run under the i OS platform, a new, fresh approach was taken, developed to benefit the company’s unique customer segment. Infor hopes that the fact that CRM i Edition was built specifically for i OS will mean a lot to those who rely on the platform to run critical business processes.

“Infor CRM i Edition helps our System i customers leverage their ERP data with new capabilities that will help them increase sales revenue, reduce sales costs, expand data visibility, enhance forecast accuracy, and improve customer service,” Kevin Piotrowski, Infor’s director of System i solution marketing was quoted as saying. “Providing innovation and support to our large installed base of System i customers is an important priority and commitment for Infor and a major factor behind our recent establishment of a business unit dedicated to our worldwide base of customers who use IBM System i,” he added.

Infor has been the owner of the System i industry’s largest ERP customer base since 2006, when a string of mergers has led the company to acquire SSA Global for $1.6 billion. At the moment Infor boasts with over 14,000 unique clients. Despite the solid client base, some experts have doubted that Infor would continue to innovate on the i OS platform and said that, the company opted to using maintenance revenue as a cash cow in the future.

Sceptics proved wrong in February, 2009, when Infor announced the launch of its dedicated System i division, headed by Mark Wright, to show commitment to further developments. Wright spent 18 years at IBM and his role as senior vice president and general manager for the IBM System i organization was to be responsible for strategic direction and leadership of all System i-based sales, pre-sales, product management, product development, and marketing, as well as working with Infor’s channel partners who sell and service software for the platform.

“Infor remains committed to the IBM System i platform, the continued development of our System i-based products and elevating service and support for these customers around the world,” corporate senior vice president Greg Corgan, said at the time. “In his role as general manager, Mark will work with IBM and our new System i team to drive product strategy and innovation, foster a more collaborative approach within the System i customer base, and provide greater overall value to customers.”

Infor CRM i Edition is the first full application launched by the department established in February. As Kevin Piotrowski, director of System i solution marketing for Infor put it, “Infor CRM i Edition is a “net new” application that was written from scratch using the Infor Development Framework (IDF), a development tool specifically for writing IBM i OS (i5/OS and OS/400) applications.

Infor CRM i Edition is already available. Pricing is dependent on the number of users and other factors. A license for an implementation for 10 to 20 named users would cost between $15,000 and $30,000.

Infor Global Solutions

Infor Global Solutions is an Alpharetta, Georgia based, privately held US software company, specialized in enterprise software ranging from financial systems and resource planning to the supply chain and customer relationships. Founded in 2002, under the name Agilisys Infor is currently one of the largest providers of business software in the world. Infor offers a full range of enterprise business software including customer relationship management, enterprise asset management, enterprise resource planning, financial management, human capital management, performance management, product lifecycle management, supplier relationship management, and supply chain management, including business specific inventory management, transportation logistics and warehouse management software.

Currently, Infor has direct offices in 125 countries, implementation and support capabilities in 100+ countries, some 8,000 employees and over 70,000 customers worldwide.

According to media sources, Infor is the 10th largest software company, and the 3rd largest business application provider (after Oracle and SAP) in the world, with a yearly revenue of around $2.2 billion (in 2008).

Infor’s executive team includes

Jim Schaper, Chairman and CEO
Raghavan Rajaji, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Gregory M. Giangiordano, Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary
Bruce Gordon, Chief Technology Officer
Rick Parker, Senior Vice President, Marketing
Ken Walters, President, Customer Direct
Gregory Corgan, President, Global Field Operations
Jerry Rulli, President, Americas Enterprise Solutions
Lawrence Chan, President, Asia Pacific
Benoit de la Tour, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMEA

As a private company, Infor is not listed on the Stock Exchange, its primary shareholder is the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital Partners.

Quickbooks is considered the #1 financial software used by US small and medium sized businesses. The new feature lets SprixCRM users to easily migrate their data between the two applications in both directions, to design and implement highly targeted and efficient marketing campaigns.

“This is an extremely powerful sales and marketing tool, especially for small businesses, as it provides a comprehensive view of customers’ overall health in terms of the relevant key indicators, without the significant capital investment and user training typically associated with alternative, custom IT solutions,” Jelinek was quoted as saying. “What’s more, since the system operates real-time, deviations in the purchasing behaviors of customers can be spotted and addressed immediately. In the proactive mode, customer trends can be identified and marketing campaigns developed to capitalize on areas of anticipated customer interest and growth potential, since SprinxCRM QuickBooks(R) Connector captures historical sales data alongside current activity,” Jelinek added.

Sprinx Systems, the developer and maintainer of Sprinx CRM was founded in the Czech Republic back in 1996. Currently they have offices in three major US cities: Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.

Sprinx Systems’ latest product announcement was the launch of its SprinxCRM Mobile for Windows Mobile earlier this year.

Sprinx CRM

SprinxCRM allows a company to effectively monitor its business activities and the service support it provide to existing clients while also recording the history of communications with clients and business partners.

The Sprinx CRM application can be accessed online from a web browser, and it can be downloaded as a desktop application, too. The online version is free for 5 users. Downloading the desktop application costs EUR 230.

Sprinx Systems is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. This highest of partner certifications issued by Microsoft denotes that Sprinx Systems meets all demands that Microsoft places on the quality of supplied solutions and services. SprinxCRM has successfully completed certification testing at VeriTest for the Microsoft “Certified for Windows Vista™” logo program.

SprinxCRM makes it possible to record client communication history in its entirety, provide managers with a detailed overview of each salesperson’s activities, and results for the entire sales department.

Thanks to integration with map solutions such as Google Maps, SprinxCRM greatly simplifies searches for client addresses, proposed routes, etc. Additionally, it is also possible to monitor the history of delivered goods and print the necessary documents with respect to each contact.

SprinxCRM makes it possible to:

• save and handle company documents
• ensure secure access according to the competency of users or groups of users
• manage access rights such as reading, modifying or erasing documents or their parts

It is easy to interconnect documents with company contacts, activities and projects and include, among other things, tools for searching through documents that have already been saved.

Although the CRM sector, and, hosted CRM services are reported to grow for the fifth consecutive years, despite all financial difficulties elsewhere (well, almost everywhere), competition amongst CRM service providers appear to get harsher and harsher as time goes by.

The above is especially true for smaller companies, as they need rather aggressive marketing (dynamic, and to the point as they usually put it), to stay in the ring. With its latest, Zwitch campaign, Zoho appears to be a poster child of aggressively expanding and rapidly growing companies, albeit Zoho is not so tiny anymore: its office suit has reached its landmark one millionth user more than a year ago.

Although Zoho might not be a newbie with its office suite applications, its ~380k unique visitors in May, 2009 make Salesforce look like a real CRM behemoth with its ~1.1m uniques (both figures are based on compete.com data). Especially considering that, CRM is just a very tiny part of Zoho’s application package, which includes a project manager, a calendar, an email, a wiki interface and many other features.

Okay, so, what’s the juicy offer Zoho is trying to lure Salesforce clients with?

Free, no-obligation assessment with a Zoho CRM specialist to evaluate needs and confirm Zoho CRM will provide benefits and functionality that are equal, or superior, to what they currently have with Salesforce.com;

Free data migration services;

A free, no-commitment, 15-day trial period for new users to try Zoho CRM with the data migrated from Salesforce.com, in order to confirm their decision to switch to Zoho CRM; and

Once a customer decides to switch to Zoho, a credit on their account for their time remaining on the Salesforce.com contract (up to six months).

A free data migration service seems pretty basic when you plan to lay your hands on your competitors’ clients: other than that there’s not much plus to it: services are equal, a trial period is usually offered to new customers as well (Salesforce, for that matter is offering a 30-day free trial for all new members), and offsetting the costs for the remainder of the Salesforce.com contract is also a minimum requirement if you are so directly targeting someone else’s loyal customers.

So finally, it all boils down to the question of price.

80%+ Savings of your CRM expenses, Zoho claims.

Which is true. Well, almost precisely.

It is pretty clear that, Zoho is a lot cheaper than Salesforce is. The 80% calculation is based on comparing two (almost random) packages: The cheaper package of Zoho ($12 per user per month) and the second chepest (Professional) package of Salesforce ($65 per user per month).

While Salesforce’s costs can be much higher than that (its Unlimited package costs $250 per user per month), and Zoho’s Enterprise Edition costs also twice as much as the one in the example, it is really difficult to match the exact functionality that are included in these packages to see the real difference in pricing.

And, another question remains: all CRM providers claim that the investment in their CRM applications, systems and strategies will pay off if used correctly. I was wondering that if this is the case, it may be worth investing a little more.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The solution, designed by Connect2Consult will help higher education institutes to automate their communication and interaction workflows towards students, bringing organizations closer to their goals of primary importance: to manage relationships with current students and alumni, and to effectively (and efficiently) educate, prepare and place students for the current job market.

Connect2Consult’s CRM solution’s modules are aimed at managing different stages of student lifecycle.

• Enquiry module aims at attracting new students to the institution, including the optimization of ROI concerning different campaings run by the marketing department.
• Enrollment module maintains all academic data and student-related process in one central access point.
• Engage module aims to prepare students for the challenges of the corporate world.
• Placement module manages the institution’s relations with partnering companies, attracting new corporations to campus placements, and increasing the visibility of the institution in the corporate world.
• Alumni module, finally, manages relations with former students, promoting continuing education programs, and aiming to generate contributions on behalf of the institution’s alumni community.

Connect2Consult highlighted that the current financial crisis has brought challenging times to Universities and the entirety of the education sector as well. To successfully tackle the current challenges, these organizations will also have to adopt best practices from other sectors, to consistently interact with their clients (former, current and potential students in the case of Universities and Business Schools) in a highly personalized manner.

While the use of CRM strategies and techniques is already widespread in almost all business sectors, education is falling way behind with CRM implementation, Connect2Constult stressed.

“We understand how higher education institutes can benefit from CRM by improving student-facing processes, by personalizing communications with students, by providing hands on training on the technology and by increasing placement opportunities thereby increasing student’s satisfaction,” the company added.