CRM - December 2007 - (Page 26)

dovetail with the coming customer revolution. Customer segmentation is vital to current business practices, but effective customer engagement takes place at the individual level. “Some talk of microsegmentation as the answer, but that’s just more filters,” Greenberg says. The real answer, he says, is what some are calling “folksonomy”—collaborative tagging or social classification to categorize content. What that amounts to, really, is self-segmentation. Greenberg admits that there are some issues to be ironed out regarding privacy and security when tying customers to the ratings they make, “but in the end, if you make something public, you have to expect it will be seen.” really challenge SaaS vendors to adapt their current model.” Not so, Leary argues. “The Web is heaven-sent for small businesses—if they can figure out and understand how to use it,” he says. His focus on small business has exposed him to several vendors—he notes Infusion, Netbooks, and Zoho—that, in his view, truly understand “that small businesses are totally 10 tech trends We here at CRM magazine pride ourselves on our foresight as well as our insight, but we also value the views of the CRM analyst community. Gartner, for example, as part of its Symposium/ITxpo in October, took a stance on the 10 technologies likely to play a strategic role in 2008. (Gartner defines a strategic technology as one “with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.” Significant may seem a fairly broad criterion, but Gartner looks for ”high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.”) Below, we’ve highlighted half of the research firm’s top 10—the ones we think are most likely to impact the CRM community—though Gartner itself acknowledges that no such list should be seen as all-encompassing. In fact, these innovations “should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as well as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies,” Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Mashup & Composite Applications. By 2010, 80 percent of composite enterprise applications will be built using Web mashups. They’ll evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when formulating an enterprise mashup strategy. Web Platform. As software-as-a-service (SaaS) becomes an ever-more-viable option, emerging Web platforms are providing access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through Web-based “cloud-computing” environments. Companies should examine how Web platforms will impact their businesses in three to five years. Real World Web. The informal term refers to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity, or context in the real world. Seek out new applications, new revenue streams, and improvements to business process that can come from real times, places, or situations. Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product space will see considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors, and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration. Metadata Management. This critical part of a company’s information infrastructure will enable optimization, abstraction, and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity, and shareability. The rest of Gartner’s Top 10: Green IT, Unified Communications, Business Process Modeling, Virtualization, and Computing Fabric. SAAS’ING THE SMALL BUSINESS So far, the vendor executives have been more or less in agreement. There’s one area with notable differences of opinion, and oddly enough, it’s one where it seems most of the news was happening in 2007: software-as-a-service (SaaS). “We are seeing some of the buzz around SaaS starting to top off,” Bergera says. “While there is still interest in instant-on and instant-off, customers are increasingly concerned about how to integrate their CRM solutions with multiple internal applications.” When they start to go down this path, he says, the current SaaS models present serious limitations. He praises Web-based CRM solutions for “relative ease of deployment and maintenance,” adding that “in an increasingly connected world, we see this as a logical deployment model for many of our customers.” However, Bergera says, organizations desire some level of integration between their front- and back-office solutions, and this will become a truly critical decision factor for many organizations. “We believe that successful CRM vendors will need to support excellent prebuilt integrations with leading back-office solutions, as well as enable rapid integration to various other applications that may be running in a customer’s computing environment,” he says. “This trend will 26 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | DECEMBER 2007 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

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

CRM - December 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity SAP’s Midmarket Design A Shift in SAP’s Growth Strategy: Buy Big to Get Bigger The Buyer Is Your Owner Prime Time for Streaming TV The Word on the Floor Market Focus: Energy/Utilities: Speaking Truth to Power (Companies) The Pulse Required Reading It’s All Coming 2.0gether Power to the People Speak Up! Document Management That's a Breeze Customers Gain Traction With Off-Road Vehicles Getting Connected With Surveys Mobile Data Gets Better Reception Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - December 2007

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