I always loved that line, and that movie. I’m a fan of David Mamet’s in fact. So, when I came across a YouTube video the other day by Wallstrip spoofing the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengary Glen Ross, I thought it was worth passing along.

The video’s been around for a while, as have the others I’ve embedded here, but they’re definitely entertaining.

In fact, anyone involved with CRM 2.0 or curious about it has probably seen the advertiser/consumer bit from Microsoft Digital Advertising. It definitely makes its point, as does the SAP ball throwers.

Enjoy.

Wallstrip, Salesforce.com and Glengary Glen Ross

He is now chief financial officer at Xactly Corp.

He talked with SearchCRM.com about his career, the trajectory of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging market for sales performance management software.

In this 13-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and business professionals (particularly those in finance), Cakebread discusses:

• CRM’s biggest surprise
• The attraction of SaaS for CFOs
• The drivers for sales performance management software
• How sales performance management software is being purchased and who’s paying
• Why customers aren’t necessarily getting those kinds of features from their core CRM or SFA vendors.

Jersey City, N.J.-based Antenna is acquiring Bothell, Wash.-based Dexterra for an undisclosed sum. It follows Antenna’s earlier acquisition of Vettro in November.

While the companies are really mobile middleware players, this is an important development for the CRM market. I talked with Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst over at Yankee Group about the deal.

“We’ve been waiting for consolidation of this middleware market for a while,” she said. “It was Antenna, Dexterra, Sybase and a bunch of smaller players. Now it’s coming down to Antenna and Sybase.”

When it comes to mobile CRM, enterprises really need to pay heed to the mobile middleware vendors, Kingstone said. In fact, SearchSAP.com just had a story on how SAP is relying more on partners for its mobile strategy — with NetWeaver mobile taking a back seat. As Kingstone pointed out, Oracle’s mobile strategy has primarily centered around the apps themselves.

“To really make mobile CRM effective, you need to look at it outside the box and at the process,” Kingstone said. “Don’t just take an SFA app and throw it on a mobile phone and expect people to use it. You need to look at what [the] sales person needs — sales data, pricing data — things that are outside of different applications.”

That’s where the mobile middleware providers come in. They can bridge the applications, operating systems and mobile devices. The proliferation of smartphones is adding another level of complexity as well and has a few companies abandoning laptops for their mobile sales force and moving exclusively to smartphones.

Ultimately, the Antenna/Dexterra deal should be good for end customers, Kingstone said.

“I think it’s better to have fewer, stronger players,” she said. “From an enterprise standpoint they should take a look at these vendors before they implement a project.”

I was talking about it with Jo Maitland, executive editor of our new Cloud Computing site, who blogged about the SaaS platform release over on The Troposphere. She makes a good point. It’s an age-old trick. Offer up the first taste for free to get people hooked and then charge them for the rest.

Just like the pusherman we were warned about in elementary school.

It’s also remarkably similar to the way Salesforce.com built its presence in the CRM marketplace. Benioff and company built an easy-to-use tool with low up-front costs that the vice president of sales could buy with his own budget, bypassing IT. Once it was in, the sales force loved it, the data was in the system and there was no breaking the addiction.

The press release seemingly makes no secret of Salesforce.com’s ambitions, quoting Nucleus Research’s Rebecca Wetteman:

“Customers have told us they get hooked on Force.com after building their first app.”

Will Salesforce.com have the same sort of results with developers?

The free offering is fairly limited: one custom application, one web site with up to 250,000 page views per month, the ability to build 10 custom objects (or database tables) per user and a sandbox development environment to test the application or site before deploying it. All for up to 100 users. It’s only available in the United States.

Beyond that businesses need to pay for the Force.com edition which begins at $25 per user per month.

A great deal for small businesses with some development skills that want to get a site up and running. We’ll see if Salesforce.com can get enterprises hooked.

As he told SearchSAP.com, SAP will release SaaS-based business applications to augment customers’ existing Business One deployments. Additionally, the new SaaS apps (no word on when they’ll be released) will be multi-tenant, abandoning SAP’s earlier commitment to “isolated tenancy.”

The multi tenancy and SaaS debate has been ongoing for years, lead primarily by Salesforce.com, which contends that a SaaS application that is not multi-tenant is not truly SaaS.

Count Denis Pombriant among those questioning traditional premise-based software vendors suddenly offering on-demand options. He wrote in a recent blog (before the SAP announcement):

I’m thinking that the usual has happened.  After years of warning signs that the conventional software business model was increasingly misaligned for the future, SaaS solutions have become a threat to conventional vendors.  During those years of warnings, many conventional software vendors chose to do nothing to upgrade their offerings and businesses to the SaaS business model - including rewriting their code.  These vendors are now attempting to throw a Hail Mary pass.

Yet it’s an argument Joshua Greenbaum has little patience for. He wrote of the multitenancy debate back in April:

My curmudgeonly comment is this: Neither methodology will matter in a few short years, because the SaaS market is set to evolve beyond delivering a “faster-better-cheaper” version of on-premise enterprise software into delivering significant value above and beyond anything that on-premise can deliver today. And once that evolution truly sets in (and the market’s DNA is recombining constantly in the service of this ideal) these tenancy debates - which are basically about the cost-structure of competing with on-premise solutions - will cede their primacy to debates about the premiums that SaaS 2.0 solution providers will be able to charge their customers. At which point the basic cost issues that are fueling the great Debate 1.0 will be off the table.

Greenbaum makes an interesting point, that the next generation of SaaS applications will win not on price or ease of installation but on features and functions because they can aggregate data, processes and people in the cloud in a way that premise-based applications cannot.

However, at first blush, these new SAP applications do not sound like that next generation. As Vinnie Mirchandani wrote:

This sounds like a “moat” strategy - protect the core, on-premise product with a series of surrounding “best of breed” SaaS

Reconcile it against the integrated, wall-to-wall is better than best-of-breed argument SAP has been using for decades. Reconcile this with their BusinessByDesign - which is a fairly broad SaaS ERP/CRM solution set - and promises we heard at Sapphire just 4 weeks ago about that “bear coming out in the summer”

Meanwhile, we hear even less about SAP’s commitment to SaaS-based CRM than we do about its overall CRM message. That’s apparently good news for companies like NetSuite, who’s CEO Zach Nelson called the Wookey news his company’s “IBM moment.”

Our friends over on the IT Bookworm Blog, recently posted a free chapter download from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Unleashed on the evolution of Microsoft’s product. Brent was also good enough to point to the ample content on Microsoft Dynamics CRM we have on the SearchCRM.com site.

While we’re on the subject of Microsoft CRM resources, also be sure to check out the ITKnowledge Exchange’s questions and answers on the subject.

Meanwhile, the xRM Virtual User Group is offering up a session on developing an xRM tool (Microsoft’s latest positioning on using Dynamics CRM as a platform for developing other applications).

Finally, the Microsoft Developers Network notes that Microsoft has released Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics 4.0.

Hopefully this will be of some use to you and let us know if there are more Microsoft CRM resources we can provide.

For a company that proclaims itself the leader in CRM, it sure didn’t have much to say about the subject at its recent Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP released its Business Suite 7, which includes a new CRM update, in February. But you wouldn’t have known it listening to the keynotes this week. While last year’s conference featured some significant news with SAP’s partnership with RIM to run SAP CRM natively on the BlackBerry, this year featured nary a word about CRM.

Certainly SAP wanted to focus on its new sustainability efforts, both its own and its product for customers, as well as the BusinessObjects Explorer, search technology based on BusinessObjects Polestar acquisition.

And I did sit down with Jujhar Singh, senior vice president of CRM product management and Volker Hildenbrand, vice president of solution management for CRM. They talked about SAP’s efforts to make CRM “simple, powerful and easy to use and deploy,” which is pretty much the same message around the business suite as a whole. SAP’s focus on business processes was also made clear and Singh and Hildenbrand both mentioned that SAP has incorporated CRM with end-to-end business processes around case management for the public sector and loyalty management.

“CRM is not just for the front end you have to tap into the back end,” Singh said.

Yet, that was about the extent of it. Even Paul Greenberg, industry luminary, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and never one to spare a word when it comes to the CRM market had little to say about SAP’s CRM efforts in his blog:

With some caveats, especially related to Territory Management, they’ve developed a CRM product, CRM 7.0 that will be highly regarded and is a valuable addition to the choices that that enterprises have.

Greenberg’s commentary focused more on SAP’s excessive adherence to a scripted message, some criticism of one exec in particular and his take on SAP’s on-demand aspirations:

I am constantly perplexed by the on demand strategy of this company. Leo was both vague and ultimately defensive and didn’t provide any real reason to let me see that SAP is on the right path to an actual Business ByDesign product that is anything but fluff. I heard Leo make a commitment to “on demand” or “on demand, on premise, hybrid or anything that you want to use.” I even heard him speak on the “cloud coming to earth” and their architectural map had a bottom layer of private cloud - virtualization - and public cloud in that order. But the delivery dates? Unclear. Again. It was almost as if he said, “We are committed to on demand and we’ll deliver it to you….someday.”

Business ByDesign (or the absence thereof) got plenty of coverage before and during the show. Maybe unnecessarily. As my colleague Courtney Bjorlin pointed out, several attendees had no interest in SAP’s cloud ambitions and a few weren’t even sure what it was.

A story from Reuters that “SAP’s cloud venture fades,” drew some attention as well as a chronology of SAP’s Business ByDesign efforts to date. Joshua Greenbuam did an excellent job of shredding most of the points made by Reuters, so I won’t pile on here, but I would add that there’s no mention of SAP’s CRM On Demand products whatsoever in those stories. Sort of like Sapphire — or the past year for that matter - no mention of CRM On Demand.

SAP CEO Leo Apotheker was right in his keynote when he said, “if you think SAP is a newcomer to on demand, then think again. We’ve been doing it for five years. You can do your research.”

Of course, SAP itself is not without fault if people don’t understand that. Its PR army just hasn’t been focused there. Early analysis that CRM On Demand was just an effort by SAP to keep Salesforce.com from encroaching on its customers looking for a quick and easy way to get CRM up and running are looking more and more on target.

Apotheker did offer some promise for the future, demoing a Social Network Analyzer, but that is just a prototype at SAP Labs at this point, apparently a long way from availability.

SAP’s approach stands in stark contrast to some of its competitors. Salesforce.com issues three major releases a year, most recently its Spring 09 release, which features the ability to connect customer service data between its own customers. Even Oracle, no stranger to lengthy, on-premise development projects, has been more active with its first three Social CRM products with more on the way.

Of course, SAP still has plenty of room to grow its CRM footprint simply serving its base of ERP customers, many of whom seem content to wait. It doesn’t seem like something I’d count on.

He says that effective today, Salesforce.com will start charging its partners for support.

Denis writes:

Effective May 1, 2009 and with a 60 day grace period, Salesforce.com will begin charging its developer partners for support.  I have not seen a press release but I have a data sheet on the offering.

And

The grace period starts today and the fees start July 1, 2009.  There will be three levels of service - Partner Premier, Partner Basic, Single Cases and Community.  Fees range from free to $24,000.

Given Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s pronouncement earlier this week of “The End of Maintenance” it would certainly appear that instead of turning to customers to boost its margins, Salesforce.com is instead turning to its partners. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and many an SAP executive have long maintained that the SaaS business model can be very difficult to turn a profit with. One would imagine it’s especially difficult if you can’t charge those maintenance fees of 22% of net licensing as Oracle has always done and as SAP will eventually do once it clears up these KPIs with SUGEN. Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet posted a blog entry yesterday citing research being conducted by Jason Carter noting that companies are no longer getting their money’s worth out of maintenance. He posts a chart showing a radical decline of research and design spend as a percentage of maintenance revenue.

Is Salesforce.com just shifting the costs?

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the blogosphere over software maintenance fees this week.

The Salesforce.com CEO got things started when an internal corporate memo was “leaked” to members of the press and analysts, notably Vinnie Merchandani and Chris Kanaracus at NetworkWorld.

Here’s an excerpt from Benioff’s email:

Let me tell you about a customer that I met on our Cloudforce tour. This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center.  She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her.  That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology.  The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work.  She is paying tolls on a road to nowhere.

We can help her, and many other customers, and deliver much more for a fraction of what they currently pay in maintenance. It’s time to open up a new front in “The End of Software”– one that is long overdue.

It’s time for The End of Maintenance.

Benioff has never been one to spare time and effort on marketing or catchy taglines. “The end of software” has certainly served him well over the years. Of course, is paying a monthly or annual subscription that includes support and patches is anything more than a difference in semantics?

Judith Hurwitz doesn’t think so.

My answer would be no. It is all about accounting and economics. Clearly, Salesforce.com spends a lot of money adding functionality to its application and someone pays for that. So, what part of that monthly or yearly per user fee is allocated to maintaining the application? Who knows? And I am sure that it is not one of those statistics that Salesforce.com or any other Software as a Service or any Platform as a Service vendor is going to publish. Why? Because these companies don’t think of themselves as traditional software companies. They don’t expect that anyone will ever own a copy of their code.

The Benioff discussion was followed days later by SAP revealing it was delaying scheduled increases to its software maintenance fees until it met a series of KPIs established by a coalition of user groups. For its part, open source CRM provider SugarCRM, revealed a plan to offer both its on-premise and SaaS CRM applications on a monthly subscription basis.

Suddenly maintenance fees are less popular than a frat boy returning from his Mexican spring break with a fever.

SAP has been fighting a PR battle since its new support structure was first revealed, trying to convince customers that a few more features in Enterprise Support will make it worthwhile for them to see the price go from 17% of licensing fees to 22%.

It would be foolish to argue that Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors haven’t helped to highlight the expense of maintenance fees. But there are plenty of other forces at work sounding the alarm and raising questions. The evolution of third-party support providers like Rimini Street and TomorrowNow, that charge half of what companies like SAP and Oracle do, certainly made people sit up and take a closer look. SAP can also share the credit (or blame from its own perspective, I suppose). It bought TomorrowNow to take a chunk out of Oracle’s maintenance revenue from its PeopleSoft and JD Edwards acquisitions. It wasn’t too much later before the man reportedly behind the plan, Shai Agassi, was off proselytizing about electric cars and SAP found itself in court, defending a $1 billion lawsuit from Oracle. It’s hard to discount Forrester’s Ray Wang in all this. He helped SearchSAP.com break the news about SAP’s maintenance hike and has been an outspoken opponent ever since.

Meanwhile, Oracle, which has always charged maintenance at 22% of license fees, remains unapologetic and shows no signs of offering concessions or even sharing the maintenance wealth with its partners. It’s also made sure to move customers of acquired companies on cheaper plans up to its more expensive structure.

In fact, in a conference call with financial analysts in September, Ellison crowed about that part of the business.

“Software maintenance is now approximately half of our business. It’s an extremely high-margin business and continues to grow in an extremely healthy manner. It’s the highest-margin portion of our business and is now also the largest portion of our business.”

Just how long Oracle, SAP or any enterprise software vendor can hold the line on their high-margin maintenance business amidst pressure from SaaS, third-party vendors and the economy itself remains to be seen.

Now that Benioff has joined the chorus, we can expect a lot more noise.

While consolidation has been a major factor in the market for CRM software for large enterprises, start-ups are cropping up all the time to serve the SMB sector.  SearchCRM.com sat down with Brent Leary, co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consultancy and advisory firm focused on small and mid-sized enterprises that provides training and best practices for implementing CRM software and CRM programs.

In this 15-minute podcast, Leary discusses:

• The current state of adoption of CRM software among SMBs
• Best practices for SMBs deploying CRM software
• What SMBs have learned about CRM failure from their enterprise counterparts
• The effects Web 2,0 and social networking are having on managing customer relationships and how SMBs can and are taking advantage of it