CRM- September 2008 - (Page 31) NGENERA Voice in the User Interface There’s a large push to try and make CRM life easier for employees on the road, trying to resolve customer issues, land sales contracts, and deliver effective marketing—all at once. Mountain View, Calif.–based Ribbit is taking a fresh look at how to move critical data into standard CRM applications. Ribbit, which calls itself “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company,” provides telephone carrier infrastructure, voice services, and the integration of voice with business applications. That last bit is the real innovation, says Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group. Ribbit offers an application programming interface (API) so developers can add a voice aspect to standard applications. “The importance of this is it enables more functionality to be projected out to the mobile worker and adds much more to the cellphone as a user-input device,” Pombriant says. “Because of that, it changes user interface and makes applications less dependent—not independent—on keyboards for data input and retrieval, which is huge when you’re dealing with a small handheld device.” While Ribbit provides tremendous opportunity for organizations to make voice an active part of the user interface, Pombriant believes the success rests squarely in the hands of the application developers. “If this is done well it can be revolutionary,” he says. “If it’s done poorly, it probably won’t amount to much.” He adds that there will be a learning curve to developing a quality voice interface but that “the tools are certainly in place to begin this process.” The potential is clear in the flagship enterprise product, Ribbit for Salesforce, which links mobile voice communications and business workflow. By treating voice as a data object, Ribbit for Salesforce allows voice-enabled services including updating records by phone, the integration of voice and messages into workflow, and a Web-based clone of a user’s mobile phone in Salesforce.com. Ribbit’s ties to Salesforce.com, “the market share leader in on-demand CRM,” will also help the rethinking of voice and CRM, Pombriant says. “Ribbit is an on-demand product, so this makes very good sense.” In fact, Ribbit’s got lots of people hopping: At press time, rumors continued to circulate that BT had already snapped up the company, for a reported $55 million. —Christopher Musico CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | SEPTEMBER 2008 acquiring an On-Demand Taste The rise of on-demand CRM has been on our magazine’s radar for quite awhile now. Tier1 Research, a division of The 451 Group, recently found the on-demand CRM market will catapult through 2010 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41 percent compared to a predicted 6.2 percent CAGR for onpremises CRM. Then there’s Austin, Texas–based nGenera, an on-demand vendor that hadn’t been on our radar before exploding onto the scene with its May acquisition of customer interaction solutions provider Talisma. Zachary McGeary, associate analyst at JupiterResearch, says that the Talisma acquisition is important, but only one chapter to the story. “This doesn’t paint the whole picture of what this company is trying to do [and] the strategy it envisions,” he says. “NGenera is continuing to grow to become a more complete on-demand, end-to-end offering for organizations.” It’s evident that nGenera executives have a clear company vision—a 10-point manifesto on its Web site makes the case for a complete on-demand enterprise suite. A quick glance at the company’s own timeline shows a fast yet steady stream of acquisitions—and $70 million venture capital raised—since its inception as BSG Alliance (the company changed its name to nGenera Corp. in April) in January 2007. McGeary says that nGenera’s method of building up its ondemand suite of applications mainly through acquisitions differs from the typical path, which generally involves more of an emphasis on product development. He stresses that this is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, but nGenera is going about its acquisitions in the right way. “The company is always thinking ahead and seems to be moving at the right pace,” he adds. “When you integrate products into a complete offering there is a time frame in which that needs to be completed. If nGenera was to acquire all these solutions [simultaneously], it would have no resources to bring them into the fold all at once.” When nGenera does pull it all together, traditional on-premises vendors might have to sit up and take notice. “The applications— and technology ecosystem—[that] companies have to maintain their businesses often consist of solutions from myriad vendors for which integration can be rather difficult, tedious, and expensive,” McGeary says. “Some of the application software may be hosted, but it is still on premises and rather messy. What nGenera foresees as the future is providing a complete on-demand [pre-integrated] suite of applications, and it is building around this vision I don’t think it’s unrealistic by any means.” —Christopher Musico www.destinationCRM.com RIBBIT 31 R I S I N G S TA R S rethinking http://Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com
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