Monster Mashups

Where are all the enterprise mashups?

The concept of the mashup—a composite application built from easy-to-integrate, reusable components—is simple: inside one application, you automatically show, compare or contrast information from somewhere else. Furthermore, you don’t have to provide parameters; the mashup automatically combines the information.

Some excellent examples involve Google Maps. For example, after the recent earthquake in Chile, mashups provided current information on road closures as well as open supermarkets. In the U.S., meanwhile, one mashup uses data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System to pintpoint road fatality black spots.

These are incredibly useful applications, but they’re also quite consumer focused. Which leads me to wonder: Where are the enterprise mashups? In 2008, Forrester Research predicted that the enterprise mashup market would reach $700 million by 2013. Ajax, Web Services and location-based services were all the rage. Experts predicted that mashups would free enterprise users especially from the tyranny of waiting weeks or months for IT to create the reports they needed—if indeed they did ever get created.

But is this user-driven state of enterprise information liberation still unfolding in 2010?

Who Wants Mashups?

In the CRM realm, on-premise Siebel CRM software, version 8.1, added an applet-based services, making it relatively easy to embed some service information into other applications. Salesforce.com also makes using these types of applets relatively easy. For example, you can access a contact’s LinkedIn information from Salesforce.com.

Perhaps the above is useful, but so far it doesn’t herald an information-access revolution.

Workplace Mashup Manifesto

What we really need are mashups with hardcore workplace upsides. For example, if I’m working in a service center and a client calls, I’d like to see all of the trouble tickets the client has open, and know if there are any outstanding issues, before I try to up-sell or cross-sell him.

From a professional standpoint, this is the information you need. And if it’s delivered via a mashup—meaning that on one page, I can manipulate and close out the trouble ticket, enter the client’s credit card to resolve the billing dispute or automatically dispatch a required part and provide an actual Fedex tracking number—so much the better.

Liberating Enterprise Data—Or Not

Technically speaking, however, creating enterprise mashups remains challenging. The sticking point is internal data. Combining your CRM application’s contact list with Google Maps to build better territories is one thing. But generating customer-facing epiphanies (or at least really great service)—for example, by mashing-up your CRM, ERP and financial systems and legacy back-end systems via Web-enabled SOA to manipulate data in any of those systems in real time—is relatively difficult, simply because the information most often remains locked in those various systems.

Financial Services Firm: We Don’t Need No Stinking Mashups

Furthermore, organizations that do make the effort to integrate and combine information from numerous systems in innovative ways often don’t need user-driven mashups; they just need the information. For example, Innoveer has been helping a large US financial services firm to extract operational data from numerous back-end systems, combine it with CRM information, and provide agents with a single Siebel CRM homepage—backed by Siebel Analytics—containing, at a glance, everything they need to know.

Front and center on the agent’s homepage is a report listing recently placed orders. This is vital information because the best way to ensure these orders turn into deals is by reaching out—the agent following up by phone, asking how they can help, and using their sales smarts to close the deal. Another report, to encourage better performance, analyzes the revenue each agent has generated, versus the number of client calls they make.

The end result: Agents see useful information, without glimpsing the underlying systems complexity that brought them the information. (That’s definitely not “need to know.”) Even better, they didn’t have to build it themselves.

Not A Quant at Heart?

Perhaps that’s the ongoing roadblock for mashups: It presumes that end users will want to mashup CRM, ERP and financial information themselves. For a small set of power users willing to get their hands dirty, this may be true. But for salespeople who excel at selling, or who can be encouraged to reach this state, the imperative isn’t to provide them with cutting-edge, self-service Web applets, but simply with the information they need: Who do I sell to, and where do I find them?

Easy access to essential information is the currency of any great sales organization. Until composite applications can provide that, and professionals have a compelling reason to use them, we won’t see many enterprise mashups.

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When it comes to CRM, less is more—and mashups are no exception.

Even without mashups, organizations have access to great techniques for getting the data they need. In particular, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) help organizations integrate their systems and consolidate information to better manage customer data and ensure a single, definitive source of information.

Call Centers in the Cloud

Why run customer service in the cloud? Well, let’s rephrase the question in terms of business results. Namely, doesn’t every top-notch call center want to improve:

• Growth by cross-selling and up-selling customers with relevant offers?
• Efficiency by providing service representatives with a better picture of the customer?
• Customer satisfaction by talking with customers more knowledgeably, as well as with greater empathy and intimacy?

For example, you call to renew your car insurance policy. In the call center, the service representative sees not only your account history but also your current Facebook profile picture—a family photo—and notices you have a teenage son. He asks if you’d like to add him to the insurance policy as well.

Or say you’ve been in a fender bender and need to get your car fixed. When you phone your insurance company to locate the nearest auto body shop,  the service agent notices—again from your Facebook photo feed—that you have small children. She asks if you need car seats with your loaner, or if you want to use the ones you have.

In both of these situations, giving the service agent a fuller picture of the customer they’re assisting helps everyone and makes for a richer customer experience. These are just some of the benefits of moving customer service to the cloud.

Insurance Agents Relocate to the Cloud

Recently I asked, Why not run CRM in the cloud? (Just for definition’s sake, by CRM I refer not only to sales force automation, but also to marketing and customer service.) In other words, why not use software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

For many organizations, SaaS customer service applications will meet their needs. For example, Innoveer recently helped a property and casualty (P&C) insurance company deploy a SaaS-based customer service application for about 100 call center agents. This isn’t the largest call center we’ve ever worked with, and perhaps the SaaS application doesn’t have all of the advanced features that some of our bigger call center customers have, such as interactive voice response (IVR) integration or computer-telephony integration (CTI) support.

But from a functionality standpoint, the application meets all of the organization’s case management needs—from case capture and assignment to resolution and closure. Furthermore, thanks to having a good plan (because pursuing SaaS CRM applications without a plan is a recipe for failure), the P&C insurer quickly got and running.

What’s not to like about less expensive software that rapidly delivers business value?

Cloud-to-Cloud Integration Benefits

Another reason to run service applications in the cloud is for cloud-to-cloud integration. Many organizations, for example, would love to link their customer service platform to Facebook, so when a customer calls in, the service agent can literally see who they’re helping.

Well, connecting your SaaS customer service application to Facebook is much easier than integrating on-premise CRM with Facebook. (For example, salesforce.com has a Facebook connector; on-premise Siebel does not.) In fact, integrating any two cloud applications will always be easier than integrating an on-premise application to the cloud. With SaaS, one person builds a connector and thousands of people can use it. Whereas when integrating an on-premise application to the cloud, finding that economy of scale is, at best, difficult.

As the Cloud Expands, So Do Service Possibilities

Is SaaS right for all customer service requirements today? No. But that’s changing as the cloud (which includes platforms and infrastructure—not just SaaS) continues to expand.

In other words, as the cloud evolves, the attendant costs and benefits will drive more companies to host their call center in the cloud.

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Mastering customer service, regardless of whether it’s backed by on-premise or SaaS applications, first requires treating the call center as a strategic asset. In other words, drop the “necessary evil” thinking and remake your call center or contact center into a valuable corporate asset.

Until you get your customer service business practices and self-service sites in order, from a service standpoint also forget social networks. (For more on setting the right service priorities in a social networking world, see The Tweet Must Die.)

Finally, with online self-service success rates declining, maybe we should all just use Facebook for every online customer service interaction instead.

SaaS Seeking Large Enterprises

As the cloud expands, it's extending SaaS to even the biggest businesses. Photograph by doug.siefken.

Large + Complicated = On-Premise CRM?

Why not run CRM in the cloud? In other words, why not use SaaS CRM applications, provided they deliver—as they typically do—more rapid procurement, easier manageability and a lower total cost of ownership, compared to on-premise CRM applications?

Well, size may be one factor. Many people’s perception is that SaaS doesn’t work well for large enterprises. But in fact, we’ve found that SaaS solutions are quite a good feature and functionality fit for many organizations, large or small. As the list of salesforce.com customers shows, many heavy hitters are SaaS devotees.

On the other hand, SaaS isn’t the best fit for every organization, and especially large organizations with quite complex requirements. For example, we’re currently helping a large legal information services provider to adopt a new CRM system. Based on our recommendations, the company is implementing an on-premise application, in part because it needs to integrate its CRM software with various back office, order management and provisioning systems. The goal: to enable the company’s sales force to quickly move from quote to order, and then organize product delivery, all from within the CRM application. Building this is relatively complicated, technologically speaking.

Given that technical complexity, as well as the required integration, this type of project is not a great fit for SaaS—at least not in 2010.  I include that caveat because, going forward, we do see more projects of this nature—technically complex CRM implementations requiring advanced functionality and integration—being well served by SaaS.

Redefining the CRM Choice: On-Premise or SaaS

A little over one year ago, Innoveer released its guidance about when to use SaaS versus on-premise CRM software: The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software or SaaS.

The gist is that in 2008, SaaS CRM applications didn’t offer as many features, or as much functionality, as on-premise applications. For projects with a greater degree of technical or organizational complexity, on-premise CRM software was the better choice.

But that equation has been changing rapidly—and will continue to do so—as cloud computing evolves, further extending SaaS and providing greater business benefits. CRM analyst Denis Pombriant explains:

The Cloud [has] three parts: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software (SaaS) and, now, a development platform (PaaS). (…) The new ubiquity [of computing access] spawned by Cloud Computing — all three components — is spawning new, fast and, above all, mobile business processes, not just applications.

In other words, SaaS is now just an application layer—albeit with some minimal accompanying tools—in the cloud. To which the cloud adds an infrastructure layer (servers, storage and bandwidth from the likes of Amazon and Google) and platform layer (such as Force.com). Altogether, these layers can make any SaaS application much more useful and easy to work with.

Bigger Clouds, Greater Benefits

As cloud computing expands, it makes SaaS more extensible, useful and cost-effective. Hence my prediction is that SaaS CRM will evolve to become more deeply connected with the expanding cloud ecosystem. In other words, organizations of any size will be able to support much more complex business processes, at lower cost, using SaaS CRM applications.

In 2008, we said that “CRM projects must now begin by answering this fundamental question: on-premise or SaaS?”  Today, however, the question is simpler: Why not use SaaS? And as the cloud evolves, in another three or five years, will we even bother to ask?

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When weighing the pros and cons of on-premise versus SaaS CRM software, assess functionality requirements, organizational structures, costs and long-term goals. For more information, see our aforementioned white paper, The New CRM Choice: On-Premise Software Or SaaS.

Finally, want to know which SaaS CRM software is best? See our CRM Software Smackdown.