CRM - November 2007 - (Page S4)

4 November 2007 Sponsored Content BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE COMBINED WITH CRM HELPS DELIVER COMPLETE INSIGHT INTO YOUR BUSINESS, ENABLING KNOWLEDGE BEST PRACTICE: EVALUATE ON-DEMAND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE OFFERINGS AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL ON PREMISE SOFTWARE. WORKERS AT ALL LEVELS OF YOUR ORGANIZATION TO MAKE FASTER, MORE INFORMED DECISIONS. As with other on-demand or softwareas-a-service (SaaS) offerings, BI on demand can deliver the functionality and power of on-premise reporting and analytics combined with the ease-of-use, ease-ofimplementation and administration, and cost-efficiencies that have made on-demand services so popular. With an on-demand solution, such as crystalreports.com, Business Objects OnDemand, and Information OnDemand, you can give insight to customers and partners immediately, without an IT project. RapidAdvance, a leading direct provider of cash advance services for small and midsized businesses, uses Salesforce.com as its CRM tool for end users ranging from internal sales teams to executives to partners. With virtually no IT department or resources to call on, RapidAdvance evaluated all its options and chose Crystal Reports and crystalreports.com to access, report, and share its company data, which included Salesforce.com. “Crystal gave us the breadth and depth of reporting that other solutions we looked at couldn’t deliver, including Salesforce.com itself. I downloaded the free trial of crystalreports.com and found it unbelievably easy to work with,” says Scott Cohenford, Senior Analyst at RapidAdvance. “A major feature in crystalreports.com is its direct integration into the Salesforce.com interface. All Salesforce users are in the application every day as part of their daily routine. All they have to do is click on a tab and they have all the reports they need, instantly. Business Objects provides a complete on-demand solution that allows us to continue growing our BI strategy as we grow our business.” BEST PRACTICE: ENSURE PROVEN COMPATIBILITY WITH YOUR EXISTING CRM SYSTEM, ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS, AND DATA SOURCES. management, ensure that any BI solutions you implement will work seamlessly and efficiently with your existing CRM systems. Whether you have on-demand CRM from Salesforce.com or on-premise solutions such as Siebel, Microsoft, PeopleSoft, or SAP, make sure that the BI solutions have proven, effective integration that will result in a smooth, pain-free deployment and fast time to results. Also investigate the BI vendor’s ability to work with a wide variety of data sources. Although many companies initially run reports against individual systems like Salesforce.com, it’s likely that, over time, your organization will deploy BI against additional systems and databases or that you will need to access data from several sources to see the total picture. By ensuring that your BI vendor can report from large or disparate data sets, you can also avoid the painstaking and time-consuming process of manually combining data. BEST PRACTICE: EVALUATE YOUR NEEDS FOR SCALABILITY, FLEXIBLE PRICING, AND PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY. hosting company relationships, and service level agreements (SLAs). BEST PRACTICE: ENSURE STATE OF THE ART SECURITY PROTOCOLS ARE IN EFFECT. Given the sensitive nature of the data and analysis captured by a business intelligence application, it is critical that companies carefully examine the security measures that the solution vendors have adopted to protect their proprietary information, particularly if you are deploying an on-demand solution. Encryption and other technical safeguards should be in place, as well as SAS 70 certification to assure that the vendor has the proper policies and procedures to protect its customers’ valuable data. Within the tool, you should also be able to specify permissions and user profiles to ensure that users receive only the reports relevant to their needs. Business intelligence combined with CRM helps deliver complete insight into your business, enabling knowledge workers at all levels of your organization to make faster, more informed decisions. It allows you to combine marketing data, leads, opportunity data, and now even external market data into a single, comprehensive report or analytic. Decision makers will be able to see the complete picture of business performance, often in real time, and make decisions that will truly impact competitive advantage. Business Objects is the world’s leading BI software company, transforming the way the world works through intelligent information. Business Objects is also the clear leader in on-demand business intelligence with its full suite of SaaS offerings: crystalreports.com, crystalreports.com for salesforce.com, Business Intelligence OnDemand and Information OnDemand. To learn more and experience free trials, visit www.ondemand.com or www.crystalreports.com. To maximize your CRM investments and fully leverage your knowledge 1 If the utmost in flexibility and scalability —up or down—is desired, then the attractiveness of an on-demand BI option becomes even greater. One key advantage of on-demand solutions is that they can be adopted in an incremental fashion. This permits companies to test SaaS solutions in pilot situations, or add new users or application modules on an “as needed” basis. An on-demand application should be able to accommodate an increasing number of users to grow with a company’s needs and offer flexible monthly subscription pricing to fit your budget requirements. Because companies continuously rely on their BI solutions to make both strategic and tactical decisions, the on-demand service must be available 24x7. Carefully review the SaaS vendor’s uptime performance records, service delivery infrastructure capabilities, Kurt Schlegel, Gartner research director, Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2007, Chicago, IL. http://www.businessobjects.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://crystalreports.com http://Salesforce.com http://Salesforce.com http://crystalreports.com http://crystalreports.com http://Salesforce.com http://crystalreports.com http://www.ondemand.com http://crystalreports.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - November 2007

CRM - November 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Have You Caught It? The Mother of Enterprise Information Market Focus: Technology: The Simple Truth about Complex Manufacturing Q&A: Gianforte Talks CRM Required Reading Predicting Profitability Checking the Pulse of the Contact Center Cast a Narrow Net Modern Times, Modern Methods Primos Hunting Calls Snares Efficiency Nailing It Down Moving in on Mortgage Delinquencies RDS Delivery Delivers on Service Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - November 2007

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