CRM - April 2008 - (Page 17)

Insight Security may be a straw-man issue, however. “Oracle believes that there are some concerns among [its] customer base about commingling data [and] some client concerns about security and sharing of environments,” says Ray Wang, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.“The plus side: Oracle is providing another deployment option. The negative side: Customers still have mostly unwarranted security concerns about SaaS.” The single-tenant option does have Doubting Thomases—many of them offering multitenant products of their own. “The ship sailed on single-tenancy a long time ago—multitenancy is clearly the way the industry is going,” says Bruce Francis, vice president of corporate strategy for Salesforce.com. “All the mostsuccessful, best-integrated companies are multitenant. All the innovation happens with multitenant providers.” While Francis is quick to note that Oracle is a powerful company run and staffed by very smart people—Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff was there for 13 years—he also says it’s built on selling licenses of installed software and may find it hard to change old instincts.“The market closed on ASPs in the late ’90s,” Francis says. “The basic question now is, ‘Are you going to invest in a model that has essentially already failed?’” Can Oracle singlehandedly make single-tenancy a viable option again? Oracle’s grid computing—which combines computer-processing power across multiple machines, adding inexpensive servers as needed—“opens up a lot of options for companies wanting to try ondemand computing,” says Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, a CRM consultancy. “[It] gives Oracle the ability to let some customers use single-tenant solutions while others take advantage of multitenant solutions,” Pombriant writes in his company’s blog. “This ‘have-ityour-way’ approach may mean the weakening of the multitenant argument in favor of on-demand computing, but, in reality, that argument has been weakening for some time.” —Marshall Lager www.destinationCRM.com The Rebirth of Taxes Online- and catalogue-only merchants are being called out for getting a head start, but a new bill hopes to even the score o one likes paying taxes; but we do like knowing that our garbage will get picked up every week and that our roads will be plowed during a blizzard. Still, there’s a reason people don’t like the taxman, so it’s no wonder the debate over mandatory sales-tax collection is so heated. Catalogue and online merchants have long enjoyed the advantages of a tax-free environment, provided that they didn’t have a physical presence—or “tax nexus”—in the state where a given consumer resided. In a 2004 assessment, states were reportedly concerned with the estimated uncollected taxes generated by e-commerce: $3.8 billion, an amount that can only be higher today. To Maureen Riehl, vice president of government and industry relations counsel for the National Retail Federation (NRF), the discrepancy “doesn’t make sense.” Well, the states may be cents-less no longer. Congress’s proposed Sales Tax Fairness and Simplification Act (H.R. 3396)—a version of which has been introduced in each of the last three congressional sessions—aims to give “It’s not the each state the right to require businesses that participate in interstate commerce to collect a sales tax from customers, information regardless of the business’s tax nexus. superhighway. Most states, particularly those that don’t impose an income tax—such as Florida, Texas, and Nevada—rely on sales taxes It’s a real to help balance their budgets. “It’s the only way to get at conhighway—and sumers that visit your state…and [it] alleviates some of the those take burden that’s otherwise borne by your in-state residents,” Riehl money not only says. Given the current state of the economy, it’s not surprising that states are eager to get money wherever they can. to build but to The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), however, believes maintain.” that states shouldn’t have this authority; rather, each business should be able to choose for itself where it operates, and under whose jurisdiction. After all, says Mark Micali, vice president of government affairs for the DMA, businesses that don’t have a physical presence are choosing to do without the in-state benefits associated with tax collection: being a part of the community, hiring local employees, contributing to the political environment, and other rights assumed by a corporate citizen. Without that, he says, out-of-state companies are “solely responsible to the vagaries of what the state wants to do.” To this point, the NRF is in complete disagreement. Out-of-state businesses, Riehl says, “use [the] roads…[and] get to take advantage of the court system [or]…if there’s an accident and the police or firefighters are involved.” These are legitimate costs of doing business, she says, especially if a particular company is dependent on shipping. “It’s not the information superhighway,” Riehl adds. “It’s a real highway—and those take money not only to build but to maintain.” Perhaps the most significant grievance expressed by the DMA is that the proposed law fails to address the primary objective of “simplification.” In a hearing last December, the DMA’s tax counsel warned of the bill’s many failings: no CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | APRIL 2008 N 17 http://Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - April 2008

CRM - April 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point A Tenancy of One’s Own The Rebirth of Taxes destinationCRM Dashboard Labor Disputes Reach The Contract Center The Plight of the Wirelines Required Reading The 2008 Service Awards The 2008 Service Leader Awards Customer Self-Service Microsoft Genesys Oracle eGain Astute Solutions The 2008 Rising Stars The 2008 Service Elite Awar Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - April 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.