CRM - January 2009 - (Page 25)

GOOGLE AND CRM Drake says, but she’s hoping to tackle it in the near future. Her only pain point involves Google Calendar: The “notes” section often won’t hold all of the pertinent information, requiring the creation of multiple calendar entries. Still, Drake says she’s very pleased—and doesn’t expect to outgrow the solution soon. Neil Pearson, the controller of Hunt’s sister company Hope Research, agrees, but does report one particular snafu:“Every couple of weeks or so, [Google Apps] tends to go down,” Pearson says. “It’s a nerve-wracking 45 minutes.” Small businesses might be willing to weather such intermittent hiccups, but multinational conglomerates are less forgiving. In fact, floating all that proprietary data around the cloud in the first place has some people justifiably nervous. The issue was best brought to light by enterprise software analyst Josh Greenbaum, who wondered in a series of blogposts last summer about the content stored in Google Apps. Depending on your interpretation of the company’s Terms of Service, he wrote, it could be argued that any data and information created, shared, and stored on those applications belongs to Google—not exactly what the average corporate compliance officer wants to hear. “Fundamentally, I think Google is either being stupid or malicious: either way they’ve got to [do] more to protect their user’s [sic] content,” Greenbaum wrote in a September 24 post. After Google unleashed its Chrome Web browser that same month, more security issues surfaced regarding how the browser’s search data is stored and what exactly Google does with it. Greenbaum wrote at the time that “this latest nonsense from [Google] is further proof that you get what you pay for—and if the loss of privacy and security are the price of free, I’m ready to pay for my Web-based services.” And with more than 1 million companies having selected Google Apps to help run operations, including Google itself, the company has taken pains to address the security concerns. At a recent conference, David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, emphasized the security built into Google Apps, including SAS-70 cerwww.destinationCRM.com tification, third-party validation of its data protection, and the strength of its service-level agreements (SLAs). Those SLAs originally promised Google Premier Edition users 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail; at the end of October 2008, Google extended that SLA to include Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. The company’s $625 million acquisition of email specialist Postini in July 2007 is another sign of that commitment, adding enterprise-caliber messaging, archiving, and encryption technology. Despite the positive security measures, hecklers continue to make noise. In fact, the SLAs themselves recently came under fire in the blogosphere, and the popular TechCrunch blog drew special attention to the SLA’s definition that “Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted.” (Would your boss think it “counted” if you were the one who put into the cloud a mission-critical application that had nine minutes of downtime?) And yet Google continues to make inroads. To highlight Google Apps’ success at enterprise-scale companies, Girouard cited biological engineering firm Genentech, which almost immediately ballooned from a single Google Apps user to 15,000—and slapped Google Analytics on top of that—all the while adhering to its own high data-security standards. But if cloud-based productivity suites are simply replacing Microsoft Word, Excel, and so on, does that really change the playing field for CRM? It may not seem so at first glance, but “office productivity applications” happen to be where the day-to-day activities of any CRM-loving company take place. Once you successfully migrate those activities to the cloud, and enable them to interact, communicate, and share information with your Microsoft Seeds the Cloud, Too In the cloud-computing environment, this was the equivalent of a bolt of lightning: In early November, Microsoft made public its plans for Azure, an in-the-cloud platform strategy. The news not only made clear the company’s intent to join the cloud crowd—at a yet-to-be-determined date in 2009—but lent weight to all the cloud efforts industrywide. Once Microsoft begins taking something seriously, everyone does. “The good news is [Microsoft is] endorsing this movement. They cannot afford to ignore it and have to do what they can to catch up,” Kaplan says. “The question remains if what they have to offer is technologically sufficient to meet the needs of developers. In turn, will it satisfy the needs of the customer as well as the consumer’s customer?” Those who were out in front are quick to scoff. “Microsoft kind of understands that they are way behind on cloud computing,” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, in an interview with MyCustomer.com in the aftermath of the Azure announcement. “They did not release technology with their latest announcement and it seems to be two years away.” But there’s no denying that Microsoft, whenever it arrives on the cloud computing scene in earnest, will be a force to be reckoned with. “Microsoft is the largest software firm in the world,” Benioff said in the interview. “So if you are in the software market you are competing against Microsoft. You are if you are Oracle or if you are SAP. The reality is that you just gotta take ‘em on. What you have to do is create a more compelling customer proposition.” CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 25 http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.MyCustomer.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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