CRM Watchlist 2010

To engage that new breed of customer - the social customer vendors of enterprise and small business software are transforming the way they build and deliver their goods. Here are the companies worth your attention.
February 2010

CRM Watchlist 2010

By Paul Greenberg Every now and then, something truly revolutionary impacts the business world. In the last 7 or 8 years, we experienced a transformation in the way that we communicate. There were business ramifications of this revolution, although business by no means led the revolution. Business faced a new kind of customer a social customer. This new breed of customer set a much higher bar for business. The social customer expected businesses to recognize that customer trust had shifted from those businesses to peers, and the tools to communicate with those peers made it inexpensive, simple and fast to communicate their opinions about those same businesses to their peers. And their peers listened. Companies in the vendor world of enterprise software, particularly CRM, realized that the way they constructed and delivered their software had to change to meet the business requirements for engaging these transformed customers. This wasnt an easy transition because most of the traditional CRM software was operational and transaction-based. The new software called for customer engagement and capturing the interactions of those customers in addition to the operational and transactional. Companies also realized that the software needed to provide features and tools that would allow this social customer to sculpt their own experience of the companies with whom they chose to interact. These watchlists look at the vendors in the enterprise software and social software worlds that are making that attempt the attempt to evolve the kinds of software that both satisfy business internal requirements and extend the channels to intersect with customers. Some of these vendors are doing great at it, some not so great. After all, these are watchlists, not love letters. But all of these companies are worth your attention. Take a look, and let me know what you think. 2010 is a big year for all business. Some of these companies may even be able to help you.

Part I: The Big 4

Selection for Part I was simple: The universally recognized Four Big Bad Boys of CRM are, in no particular order, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and salesforce.com.

SAP
2010 is going to be an interesting year for SAP. As I noted in my SAP Business Influencers Conference analysis, if they are going to begin to regain some of the market, especially in the on demand and cloud worlds (which they claim a total commitment to), they are going to have to clarify their overall message. Regain might be the wrong word here gain is more appropriate. They not only must decide what they are going to be to the market, but how they are going to approach their own product/services portfolio. I have some definite differences with the efficacy of the message they seem to be presenting, which you can read in my previous analysis. But there is much more here than their message. Ive seen a release of SAP CRM 7.0 and it is a clear improvement over their first real CRM market killer product -- which was SAP CRM 2007. SAP CRM 7.0 is a very, very good app with a couple of flaws, most notably what I think was (at least when I saw it) badly executed territory management functionality. However, the overall CRM 7.0 app is not only strong in traditional sales and customer service functionality (I didnt see the marketing pieces) but also has integrated social channels such as Twitter and Facebook and allows for other channels through customization that is not hard to do. They also have, gasp of all gasps, a very

attractive, user friendly, even-better-than-the-Googlewhite-interface-of-SAP-CRM-2007, interface that allows for personalization of the workspace through individualized widget selection and through arrangement of what you want to see and view including feeds and dashboards, or, say, current opportunities that need to be acted on. But, this is about the company in 2010, not the product. Were going to be reviewing the product among many others in 2010. Okay, onward and upward. One area that I (and others) think has served SAP very well and will continue to be a market mover for them is their acquisition of Business Objects. From a CRM standpoint, there are several products of importance that come from Business Objects. First is their integration of Twitter with Business Insight, which provides a strong sentiment analysis/text analysis of meaningful Twitter streams and attaches business rules and workflow so that alerts and routing at the enterprise level based on the Twitter sentiment can be done. Second is the use of Business Objects Explorer, which theyve made the analytics engine associated with their in memory model computing. It does lightning-fast, near-real or real-time calculations (we saw 275 million data rows figured out in less than a second) and an actually accomplished on demand product with Business Objects Business Intelligence on Demand. But for them to regain ground that I think they lost in the CRM world in 2009, they need to figure out who they are fast and make a far better case for their commitment to the cloud and on demand than they have to date. While not strictly a CRM-related effort, their release of Business By Design this year will be critical to their reinvention. Theyre already at version 2.5, which they call a feature pack not a release. (I guess because it hasnt been released. Duh.) It seems to be fully functional; yet pinning them to an actual release date is a bit of a chore. They have a theoretical 100 customers now, which places them well behind the on-demand curve - at a distance they may

never catch up if they dont get down and dirty and take a calculated shot at releasing this elusive product. If they dont, they will suffer cross-enterprise, including CRM, because of their publicly stated commitment to SaaS and the cloud - at least as a hybrid (also Oracles strategy). And, honestly, I dont know that they will release it, which, at this point, puts them in the enough but too late and Im still a skeptic category. On the CRM side, to their credit, they are following some of the trends they need to. They have a major commitment to mobile. They have a REST API that smacks of mobile technology love. They have an alliance with Sybase and the Sybase iAnywhere platform, which gives them the ability to translate content on the mobile fly regardless of operating system. They have a partnership with Syclos that gives them a highly configurable field service mobile app that focuses on asset & service management. They have their BlackBerry SFA app, which was developed by RIM in breakthrough collaboration by SAP and released in May 2009, about a year after the initial announcement. In this domain, nothing could be clearer regarding their commitment - and its CRM impact. 2010 for SAP -- at least when it comes to CRM -- is a watershed year. They have three things theyre going to have to do to jump forward. First, the company has to clarify who they are and commit to that vision and mission. Second, they need a MUCH better marketing and messaging effort around CRM 7.0 despite their apocryphal someday three letter acronyms will disappear thrust taken at the SAP Business Influencers Summit. (Yeah, thatll happen soon.) This part of their work has been muddied at best, poorly managed at worst. But CRM 7.0 needs to have top-of-the-class visibility, since it could be a flagship for SAP. Third, they need to release Business By Design, even without a CRM component, so that their commitment to SaaS at least is seen as something serious, because it isnt easy to see at this point. For our purposes, a CRM 7.0 campaign and release is something that makes or breaks their position in the CRM industry

and with customers, in 2010. Its a big year for these guys. They lost ground in 2009 and need to make it up in 2010.

Then the cherry? CRM is Oracles most successful revenue producer in 2009. Not too shabby. What are the pitfalls? Well, there are a couple that can make Oracle someone less than like me. First, they have to actually release all these things they are showing and not do what the big boys often do, which is endless beta cycles. Put it on an accelerator program if need be and get it out, and iterate, iterate, iterate with the customers. Let the customers point out the production flaws. This is an area where SAP does very well and Oracle not as well. I get what their corporate imperatives are, and I understand we dont live in a pure world. But there does come a time when the customers need to know youre real, and the social customer is that much more demanding than they were five or six years ago. Releasing these products and not just endless roadmaps would go a long way to slaking that social customer thirst. Second, align the cloud messaging coming from Larry Ellison with what the benefits of the cloud to Oracle actually are. His mockery, while ha-ha funny, as you can see from the Churchill Club video, isnt appropriate if Oracle wants to be successful in 2010. Like every company with deep on-premise commitments, no one is going to fault Oracle for a hybrid model. SAP has one too. Microsoft sort of has one. As Ray Wang, one of the most respected and well liked analysts in the enterprise world, recently said on a video interview with Robert Scoble and his Altimeter Group partner, Jeremiah Owyang, on premise information, thats not going to go away. But all the edges, best of breed solutions...what you can do to move infrastructure costs, thats moving into the cloud. But Ellison needs to realize that, regardless of his pronouncements, not only is the cloud here to stay but it is of increasing interest to many of his major customers. Im not speaking of the CRM group here. They are down with that already. In 2010, then, they have to deliver their roadmap and kick up their efforts in the cloud to maintain a leading position in CRM.

ORACLE
The last year has been game changing for Oracle when it comes to Social CRM. While they initiated their effort in 2008, what they called Social CRM then was really more Enterprise 2.0 and sales optimization functionality with their announcement of Sales Prospector, Sales Library and Sales Campaign. The only thing they did that approximated actual Social CRM - meaning it provided a pipe for customer engagement - was the mobile loyalty stuff they did with LOreal, which allowed customers to provide and get user-generated content via comments, ratings, rankings etc on the consumer Internet. But in 2009, their road map and releases were spot on when it comes to the pulse of the public and business -- and were more along what we expect Social CRM technology to be. During OpenWorld 2009, they announced a number of key applications, including one from left field that I personally would never have seen coming. They announced a toolkit that worked with Siebel customer data (transactional, one must presume) that seemed to be one of the first realized applications using social characteristics - in this case Connect to someone like me access for customers using Siebel data. They arent the only company using transactional data to figure out and score who is like me. (SAS in their Customer Intelligence analytics is entirely capable of doing that.) But the fact that they are taking the social customers seriously throughout their entire CRM organization is actually refreshing. What makes Oracle a no longer so surprising contender for leadership in the Social CRM realm is that their CRM organization is committed to innovation -- and is committed to it from thought leadership (mindshare) to product development and marketing (market share). Is that a company-wide trait? Not to my knowledge; but their CRM team sure gets it.

SALESfORCE.COm
What can you say about these guys? Theyve understood from the get go that consumer thinking actually has been driving business for years. In fact, as far back as 2002, Tien Tzuo (now Zuora CEO and then CSO of salesforce.com) told me that. Their current product iterations - their so-called 4 clouds -- Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter -are indicators of that very approach, as is Marc Benioffs announcement of that very premise on the stage of Dreamforce 2009. If you look at the social vendors -- the Radian6s of the world, Jive, InsideView, etc. -- the first CRM-related company they integrate with -- their test runs so to speak -- are all with salesforce.com. These arent insane decisions. They are calculated for many reasons; the compatible technical architecture is of course part of it, though not all of it. Remember, Apex is a proprietary language. But its also the compatible culture, the AppExchange, the stage salesforce.com is willing to give selected partners, and the aura and mystique that salesforce.com provides them -- sex appeal is probably the best term. Integrating with salesforce.com is hot. I mean, salesforce.com is one of the Big 4 in everyones books, with about 1/30th the revenues of any of the others. Their run rate is $1.3 billion as of Dreamforce. Doesnt that tell you something? Salesforce.com continues to do two things incredibly well - innovate and market. While the marketing doesnt actually reflect the quality of the innovation, it does get them noticed. However, its their innovation that shines. Yet they are a very conservatively and well-run company. They combine sound business practices with a culture geared toward innovation (not a combination that lives together that easily, usually) and probably the best marketing CEO in the world -- Marc Benioff, named recently San Francisco Executive of the Year by the San Francisco

Business Times. Salesforce.com also swept all three of the major CRM Market Leader Awards given by CRM Magazine this year. Additionally, salesforce.com has made inroads into areas that they arent traditionally in and will prove, I think, to be quite formidable. Public Sector is among them. Their Force.com platform -- especially Ideaforce and Visualforce -- were used by the Obama Administration to do several things, including the Obama Transition team Citizen Briefing Book. Yet, they have a few things they need to think about too this year. Nobody gets away free. First, a clarification: Salesforce.coms marketing claim is that Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter are clouds. They are not. They are cloud apps or cloud services. Custom Cloud 2 can have the case made that its Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a component of the cloud. But the cloud per se includes a platform, infrastructure, storage, SaaS delivery etc. Now onwards. There are several things that are noteworthy about Chatter, which is their highly trumpeted Facebook and Twitter-driven social toolset released at Dreamforce 2009.

1. It is a serious attempt by salesforce.com to

provide a complete social toolset. In conjunction with its nicely enhanced sales product (Sales Cloud 2), customer service product (Service Cloud 2) and dramatically enhanced customization capabilities (Custom Cloud 2), Chatter begins to establish them as a complete Social CRM player minus a component or two -- notably reasonable native marketing functionality -- which puts them in the camp currently of only Oracle, making the same attempt from the CRM side of the house.

2. Chatters only original piece is the fact that you can

subscribe to data objects -- anyone in any system you have -- even, say SAP or Microsoft. The problem now is the lack of filters, which means nearly an all-or-none subscription to all events

around that data object -- which diminishes the value. The rest of Chatter Ive seen elsewhere, often better executed, but never as aggregated as this - and whats there is good enough. The reason I emphasize Chatter is that salesforce.com seems to be banking a lot of 2010 on the success of this particular piece of the platform - which I wouldnt. As a standalone, it doesnt impress at all - at $50 a head, its expensive and not worthy. As a layer inside of force.com this becomes impressive and a significant addition to the platform worth examining. How salesforce.com treats this in 2010 is going to be important because the companys threats are not only from SAP and Oracle and maybe Microsoft (from Azure) but also from the dozens of social vendors who are not only integrating with salesforce.com but claiming a Social CRM mantle that they may or may not deserve. The small guys nipping at their heels are good enough to take some chunks out of the salesforce.com ankle this year unless salesforce.com stays innovative, concentrating itself on new market places like public sector where they can have a competitive impact, stay the course when it comes to their 2002 plan of being the business web as they called it then and, finally, position Chatter where it belongs - inside force.com. Or else salesforce.com might be calling someone else their daddy. They are in a great, great position. They control their own destiny. But we see how that can succeed for example in baseball (NY Yankees) or fail, cant we? As a result, the remaining 40-something choices had

my Sort of methodology & Thought Process

There is no universally recognized group beyond the Big Four of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and salesforce. com. For Parts II and III of this Watchlist, I have whittled down a list of CRM vendors and social vendors numbering nearly 90 in all. I cut the total list down to 40 plus. Then I had to distinguish the winners - those worth watching in 2010 based on a number of criteria, including, importantly, having enough information on these companies to make a smart decision. Other important criteria included the clarity and consistency of their direction; good technology; potential impact; customer and analyst thinking about these companies (outside my own); and whether they fit the criteria for the companies (mostly technology) to actually be considered among those in the sphere of Social CRM - since none of them are pure Social CRM vendors. Their claims to be Social CRM might have gotten them attention, but several who claimed it didnt make the cut for one reason or another. For example, given the maturation of the industry, some of the companies I included last year because I liked them a lot -- like Zuora -- arent on this list -- though I love them even more than last year. They just arent Social CRM - now that the definition of Social CRM is approaching something that can be called rigorous without being called rigor mortis.

mICROSOfT
Every year I have to start out by saying the same thing. Im a fan of Microsoft, but.... Sadly, my projection for 2010 is something of the same. I continue to be perplexed by these guys. On the one hand they do great things that are significant in the Social CRM pantheon of things - such as integrate in the public sector with Neighborhood America (now INgage

to be separated out. Thus, in Part II youll see the CRM vendors who will continue to have (or are poised to have) an impact in the CRM world in 2010 - which largely means Social CRM. Youll also see the CRM vendors who are on a 3 or 6 months Revisit list. The 3-month Revisit list are those companies that I thought deserved recognition for the quality of their (Continued on next page)

Networks) to create the Public Idea Bank, integrate MSFT Surface with SAP apps, and give Ray Ozzie the right resources and lab to do social experimenting. Additionally, they are a remarkably innovative company despite their public image of stolid and old, with amazing projects in the works like Bing Maps, Microsoft Vine, Project Natal and, of course their strong Microsoft Azure Cloud platform. They have the best partner ecosystem in the world and the most complete, smart partner program Ive ever seen - bar none. Their Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications are strong when it comes to SFA, and customer service, and theyve made them operationally effective. Theyre working on mobile, though I still am not and never have been a big fan of Windows Mobile as a platform. Theyve even managed to show that Dynamics CRM is a surprisingly effective and extensible platform, not just a product suite. (Nikhil Hasija had me as a judge on a competition to watch about 6-7 partners build an effective CRM app using Dynamics CRM in 5 days. They all did it, to varying degrees of success. But they all did succeed.) Theyve priced the Live versions of Dynamics CRM (which they stupidly still insist on calling software plus services) at better than competitive pricing against their opposition, by nearly halving the price. They have a great PR person in Amy Adamsak, from Waggoner Edstrom who is smart and knows how to stay in touch with the analysts, etc. she has to. No slouch, she. YET - and there ALWAYS is a YET - they are just not that innovative when it comes to CRM and they need to be when all three of their chief rivals, whatever their flaws, are. They have no visible social presence beyond Neighborhood America. No presence beyond that in all sectors is a serious mistake. Even when they are innovative, they dont pursue the opportunities that they have, For example, I sat on the Board of Advisors with Surface - their multipoint touchscreen

(Continued from previous page) offering but one way or the other are just short of ready for prime time - which, by the way, could also simply be my lack of information about that. Then there was the 6-month watchlist, which were those that I thought still needed to sort their thinking out to provide some real clarity to their place in the universe, but had a lot of potential when it came to Social CRM - though each of them has some issue to deal with substantial enough to keep them off the list. Each of these lists will be presented without individual discussion but with a link to the companies involved. So, heres how it all goes down. Part II is the companies coming from the world of CRM who are becoming watch-worthy in Social CRM in 2010. The 3 months and 6 months lists in Part II are those CRM vendors who dont quite make it. Part III will be the social software vendors -- which could mean social media monitoring, community platforms, or even social channels. But what they all have in common is that they are moving toward CRM integration in some way - not always in the right way, but their noses are sniffing the right winds. There will be social vendor-specific 3- and 6-month lists here, too. display or with their Dynamics CRM Live. It could have been a market maker. It wasnt though it still remains a great piece of technology. This isnt to single out Surface, just a flaw in how Microsoft as a company pursues things. Things die as quickly as they live as far as visibility goes. Opportunities come, and the ball is dropped. The perception in the market of them is at best stolid and so so. They even frustrate their fanboys - among them me. MSFT is expected to both be a market leader and an innovator, and to be perceived as a market leader and an innovator too, not a follower, But outside of public sector constituent engagement, Im hard pressed to find the in-

novation in CRM. Their product is fine, except for marketing which is actually starting to be weaker than the pack, not in the pack since most CRM companies with supposed suites are moving forward to strengthen the social marketing at least, if not the more traditional campaign management functionality. Given that innovation is part of everyones 2010 mantra, Microsoft needs to step up this year. Im tired of YET, YET, YET when it comes to speaking of them. Honestly, I dont care which of the myriad of companies wins the competitive wars. I couldnt care less if SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow, whoever, takes the lead. What I want is for all to succeed because I want businesses to be profitable and customers to be happy and the social fabric to be right. There is room for all the companies to get a sufficient piece of the pie to do that. I dont want losers, I want winners. In the case of Microsoft, that means innovation, up front, 2010. Step it up so I dont have to say YET again in 2011. Okay, thats it for this part. Next part are the next tier of CRM focused companies. Then comes the social and other companies moving into the Social CRM space.

Now, if you know Zach, this wasnt a personal statement; he already is about as social a human being as it gets. The man knows how to party. So I watched for this throughout the year and he did what he usually does, which is to strengthen an already strong enterprise SaaS product. Some of the notable efforts were: Strengthening of their Financial edition with more cloud-ready capabilities. A significant set of additions to OpenAir, an already sterling professional services application, acquired by NetSuite in 2008. To that end, they acquired QuickArrow, a cloud based PSA solution that they then began integrating into OpenAir to extend the PSA product functionality and the client list. Acquiring a series of financial certifications in England, Wales, and Germany among others. In December, they automatically made their customers VAT-Compliant (given changes in the VAT requirements) while they slept. In other words, they, as always, took care of the operational and legal block-and-tackling that has to be part of an enterprise softwares functionality. A solid set of improvements to an already internationally strong feature rich set of applications and services. But they also hinted at what was to come during the late 3Q and early 4Q with a few rather smart and sexy mobile applications including bringing NetSuite ERP and OpenAir to the iPhone and the Blackberry. But this wasnt a year of pure karma love. They maintained series of campaigns that I have always found misplaced their relentless direct attacks on SAP and a lesser series of attacks on Sage and salesforce.com throughout the year. I wish theyd stop these overt valueless efforts that either were attacks on the specific rival they had, or took the form of we took (fill in the blank) company away from (fill in the blank) that theyve persisted in doing for years. My take: Who really cares who they stole from whom? Their products and services are good enough to stand on their

Part II: The Annual Locks

These are the other players of CRM. These are major league unto themselves one way or the other and companies that Im going to be paying close attention to in 2010 - for better or for worse. Luckily for all of us, this is a substantially larger marketplace than just the Big Four. In fact, Cognizant, SAS and Sage are bigger than salesforce. com when it comes to both revenues and scope. So maybe size doesnt matter after all. Remember though, this is a Watch List, not a Love List.

NETSuITE
In the beginning of 2009, CEO Zach Nelson told me that he intended to be more social in 2009.

own merits. I will say there was one silver lining in all of this. At one point, they actually did approach the competition the right way by announcing the availability of SuiteCloud Connect, which would integrate NetSuite and salesforce. com. Thats the way to go about being competitive. Fill in the holes the competition has, play to your own strengths. I have to admit, though, one of their more generalized campaigns like this was really funny. They offered to give you a cheaper price for NetSuite if in exchange you gave up your on premise application - they called it Cash for Clunkers. THAT was funny - and not aimed at any one company. But that was the only negative in what was turning out to be an otherwise solid year for NetSuite. But--I remembered that Zach said he was going to get more social in 2009. Damned if he didnt come through at the end of the year - a Twitter feed integration and far more importantly an alliance with InsideView to cover both CRM and ERP intelligence - NetSuites first premier partnership with anyone. This was a great move, given InsideViews preeminent position in the social sales intelligence market. So Zach came through wisely. Whats there to watch in 2010? A very good company with a childish marketing streak that has a lot to offer. What makes this all good is that NetSuite continues to build on a solid foundation and constantly improve the basics when it comes to process and even compliance. But they now are venturing at least with one or two toes in the water into the social side of services and applications - for them an important move. Once again, NetSuite is a company to watch for 2010. And maybe even a company to like a lot, if theyll just stop being attack dogs. I like them anyway.

it. Their 4Q release of the new version of the RightNow CX customer experience platform reflects what is so good about this company. They actually create well thought out and well-endowed services and applications that meet what social customers are now demanding. For example, who else has not just the feature du jour -- an embedded Twitter stream -- but also a community building platform, a web self-service capability, and tools for traditional agent contact centers among a myriad of other capabilities. Their commitment to the Cloud and Cloud connectors is strong; though Cloud Monitor, their current flagship when it comes to the cloud and social media monitoring, is still a bit light with only monitoring Twitter and YouTube feeds. However, it does have embedded sentiment analysis, which is good on the surface, though I dont know how deep it is since I have yet to see it. All in all, RightNow RX customer experience platform is without a doubt one of the best, most comprehensive in the entire software/services world. And it is well executed. They are also a solid company with 800 employees, approximately $150 million in revenue in 2009, and about $100 million in the bank. But even more than that, theyve done something which VERY few companies have been willing to undertake. Theyve transformed their culture and created an organization based on that appropriate cultural transformation. To see how it works, pay attention to their newest job position - customer success managers. These are the people whose only job is making the RightNow customers successful. They dont have quotas; they dont have bogies. Their performance is based on how successful their customers are. I know few companies willing to invest in this level of customer value creation. RightNow is right on target with this effort - a key indicator to their cultural change. But once again, there is a but -- and its around their messaging. For reasons unbeknownst to me, at their RightNow User Conference in October, they decided to say that since CRM has failed, that CX was not CRM.

RIGhTNOw
RightNow has been on a roll the last couple of years. Theyve seen Social CRM and theyre acting on

They kept insisting that they didnt want to create a new category but of course by being not CRM you are creating an are something which makes it a new category. Plus, they used me to make their case on the same web location that calls CX the big brother of CRM, in an apparent contradiction. They claimed that Ive been quoted as saying that 70 percent of CRM projects fail. I never said that; Gartner did -- and I debunked this in my post on their conference last October. But they havent changed this page where they make this claim of what I said (and I presume, other pages) so Ill reiterate it. Gartner said that in 2002 with their 55%-70% CRM project failure claim. Since then, everyone including them, pretty much recognizes the success of CRM with 55-70% of the projects succeeding as the industry matured and learned from its mistakes - like most industries do. For god sakes, its a $13 billion industry that grew during the recession and is expected to grow more. I hope they remove that claim. Though, if I were them, Id be more concerned about the not CRM marketing - since most of their prospects and clients arent going to not think of them that way - and they are a CRM company. Honestly, though, I still think the world of them. They are doing the right thing at the right time. If theyd focus on the value of RightNow CX and forget the not CRM stuff, theyd be spot on for 2010. Lets see.

What makes Sage a great story and something that I expect to see develop further in 2010 is that this is a company that was behind the eight-ball for years - always a generation and a half back when it came to how they architected their CRM applications. Plus their partner channel would compete with itself. I actually saw a Sage partner (twice happened - two separate partners) decide to have SageCRM compete with SalesLogix CRM in a meeting with potential buyers. But theyve done wonders with both their CRM products and their partner channels - not only adjusting to the contemporary customer trends and demands but also giving the partners a forum to interact with them. Theyve even done something that I never expected. They made ACT! 2010 Premium a nearly SFA product it still lacks business rules/workflows and strong pipeline management. Also, using Lithium, they created an ACT! community that had 8.9 million page views in its first 12 months. Theyve made what was a stodgy product into an exceptional one -- as they have done, to a lesser extent, with SalesLogix and SageCRM. But they havent stopped there. They have developed solid mobile products for their CRM offerings, and they are moving SalesLogix into the cloud, though that isnt a final project yet. They have folks like Ryan Zuk who knows how to stay in touch with and retain the good will of analysts and journalists, which -- as ridiculous as it sounds - is something that IT companies have to do to remain visible and competitive. So we have a company that is necessarily contemporary with technical and functional trends, on target with their target market, not getting greedy, and doing what they have to do when it comes to visibility. All in all, solid as a rock. This is where any nagging doubts remain. Rocks are solid, which means they dont flow - and resting on laurels is something that Sage/Best Software/SalesLogix (past ownerships) has had a tendency to do in the past. There

SAGE
This might be the company that made the largest leap in 2009. Not only have they mastered the REST architecture that is becoming increasingly important to Social CRM and mobile devices, but they also have introduced social features in useful ways (via their Saleslogix, SageCRM and even ACT! 2010 products) so that you can see social feeds for customers and accounts. This is on top of utilizing that simplified architecture (think HTTP) that is so smart when it comes to the Sage target market - small and the lower end of mid-sized businesses.

10

are some things they need to do and improvements they need to make. Among them:

consultants (though, again, they can borrow from within Cognizant for stuff like CMS integration), I want you to think about it. Who do you know that has SCRM consultants at all? Thats 20 more than any other company that Im aware of in the consulting realm, including the other giants like Accenture. The fact that Cognizant is creating this nascent organization not only validates Social CRM as a legitimate practice (among other things of course) but at the same time speaks volumes about the visionary leadership of their vice president of customer solutions, Peter Grambs. The fact that they have a practice is well and good, but they back the practice up with content and that makes a huge difference. They are actually developing a Social CRM framework for both technology and strategy and investing resources in products that can support them. For example, they have a sentiment analyzer that I saw not too long ago that is a solid entry into the tool belt. This is not a commercial product, but a tool for their work and their clients to use. Honestly, with not much more work, it could be a very sellable sentiment analysis tool - competitive in most ways. To top this off, they have someone actually positioned as an evangelist, Prem Kumar, whose responsibility is just that - not sales, not service, but evangelism for SCRM. Prem, one of the rising stars of CRM, made his appearance in thought leadership circles in 2009. How could I not pick Cognizant? However, like everyone on this list, Cognizant needs to continue to support this SCRM practice and grow it in 2010. Budget concerns are with everyone now, and new and innovative thinking is not usually the last to lose funds so to speak. But theyre off to a good start. Watch them in 2010 as this thing sprouts.

1. Keep innovating even though they are now on

target. I dont know what that means for them. Could be more in the mobile realm; could be the incorporation of more SMB useful social features

2. Keep eyes on the prize - dont get greedy as so

many other companies have and trick yourself into believing that you have a different target market.

3. Do a bit better - not a lot but a bit - when it

comes to thought leadership for the SMB CRM market. If Sage does these things, their ascent will continue. If they dont, they might prove me wrong in 2010. That would not be good.

COGNIzANT
This is one of my most out-of-place and yet most appropriate picks for 2010. IBM is the only consulting firm I have ever chosen for this category in the past and usually thats because of Lotus Connections. IBM is very much the enterprise solution provider. But Cognizant is here for something that they are doing uniquely, doing interestingly and doing well. That would be not just CRM consulting, but also building a Social CRM practice that is not absolutely identical to the CRM practice. For those of you who dont know Cognizant - just think a systems integrator/strategic consultancy with 66,000 consultants in total. Their CRM consultancy alone has 1,400+ associates worldwide and is not shy about drawing on their Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Integration (CDI) and Business Process Management (BPM) for consulting support when need be, making the pool that much bigger. But what they are here for is not just the sheer size of their CRM consulting practice, but their creation of a Social CRM practice in 2009. While it currently is small, with 20

ELOquA
Eloqua has always been a top of the heap kind of marketing automation solution - in my thinking, the best of them for a while - formerly very expensive,

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now better priced than they were. However, for 2010, to make it onto this list, you have to be in line with where the market is going -- and social marketing integration is one of the key places it is going. Eloqua is up to the challenge, going well beyond just the nonetheless valuable Share-to-Social that many marketing automation (especially email marketing) firms have embedded in their feature set. This year, Eloqua went horizontal and vertical when it came to expanding their already classic marketing automation platform. On the one hand, they added social media monitoring generally and share-tosocial for their email capabilities. Even better, they are integrating with the Pedowitz Groups Sweet Suite, a comprehensive social marketing suite that allows real time monitoring of prospects and customers and then, based on the response, can initiate appropriate and sometimes automated responses and offers - and so much more than that. Sweet Suite is currently integrated with Eloqua right down to the dashboard. Its easy to conclude that Eloqua has rightfully swallowed the social marketing Kool Aid. But lets also see, via CRM industry thought leader Bruce Culberts wordsmithing, what Eloqua has in store in 2010 and three reasons why they belong on this list:

recognize the new Eloqua, yet you will because the new interface is very marketing and sales user friendly and designed more as a Web 2.0 application with emphasis on ease of use. In the backend they will be offering improvements and more flexibility in almost every aspect of the offering. With these improvements and advancements Eloqua looks to once again set the standard for Marketing Automation.

3. Good People and Support: In working directly

with Eloqua I have found the people to be very committed to their customers success. They are easy to work with and do what they commit to. They have a rich set of intellectual capital and a very robust knowledge portal to share these best practices with both customers and partners. They provide multiple levels of support for a customer including global product support, dedicated customer success mangers, and a robust set of global partners ready to help clients leverage their investment in Eloqua. Good enough for me. Now Eloqua has to live up to all these expectations in 2010. Last year, they were on revisit this year they made it.

SwORD-CIBOODLE
These guys may have been my find of the year in 2009. I knew nothing of them until a dear friend of mine, Ted Hartley, got the job as COO at the company. This got me interested in seeing what they did and what their product was like. My professional interest (meaning friendship didnt buy a free love ya pass to the product) was particularly piqued after I got a demo of the product in Chicago and my investigation grew. I spoke with them, saw the product in action, met with their customers and came to the conclusion that they did something for the customer service world incredibly well - better than any other product I saw. That would be keeping the ordinary, ordinary. Keeping the ordinary, ordinary is perhaps the most important aspect of what a customer service application can support. Most customer service actions are not

1. Growth in the Global Enterprise: Eloqua is a

workhorse in the enterprise and currently has one of the most comprehensive solutions for sophisticated multichannel Marketing Automation for global companies. Large deployments are not unusual for Eloqua. Their ability to provide customers the capability to scale and process millions of automated marketing and sales transaction with large data sets is truly impressive. Eloqua has international language and global product support, a mature API and a number of successful integrations with complex legacy systems. As multinational companies aggressively deploy Marketing Automation in 2010 Eloqua should benefit greatly.

2. Product Direction: Eloqua has big plans in

2010 to release a whole new architecture, data model and user interface. You will hardly

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particularly emotional exceptions -- like complaints and the meltdowns and inadequacies associated with them. The vast majority of customer service inquiries are just ordinary e.g. the address of something, or how to do something. Many can be handled without personal direct contact with an agent via knowledge bases and web selfservice. However, if the contact is an ordinary inquiry, screwing it up creates an immensely dissatisfied customer because they would have had low expectations unfulfilled. Not bad, but a utilitarian low level. However, by being able to handle thousands of inquiries a day and keeping the ordinary, ordinary you have immensely benefited the company and customer. Of course, our industry cant just call it that so we have to create categories to explain things. So we created what Forrester called process-based CRM. This would be a focus around providing well-integrated, scalable embedded best practices solution that a large enterprise could adopt. In fact, Forrester did a process-based CRM Wave in 2009 that Sword-Ciboodle won. The accolades came for them beyond that. This company not only won numerous awards including a coveted (by me) CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition SuperStah! award for customer service. They are quadrupling their U.S. workforce, hiring like crazy to be able to meet and sustain the strong interest they are seeing in their solution. But...2010 promises to be an important year for them (for everyone it seems). Social CRM needs to be on their agenda to continue to be both interesting to potential customers for them, and to be able to provide support for the customer engagement strategies at the customer service level for those who need technology to do that. How they do that - build or buy or partner - is moot in their case. They could go on as they currently are constructed and, I suspect, they will continue to be successful. But to really crack through, providing some Social CRM capabilities in 2010 is the way that they are going to have to go to keep the ordinary, ordinary.

SAS
This choice, I have to admit, is both one that makes me happy and one that Im almost reluctant to make. On the plus side, they are a company that Ive admired for their culture forever. First, they are consistently named one of the best places in the United States to work for year after year. Second, they dont stray from what they do extremely well, meaning they build on their strength as a firm that makes analytics tools. Third, in a somewhat myopic but still productive way, they are attuned to what are typically going to be the contemporary trends that will have a lasting impact - meaning arent fads - and then develop the tools that businesses need - provided that its in the realm of what SAS does really well. Hopefully, that makes sense to you. What I mean is simple. SAS in 2009, decided that since analytics on the on the one hand, and management on the other are their strong suits, they need to develop products that will take the social data, slice it, dice it and come up with insights - not just data aggregation and some organized way of looking at it. To that end, they are looking at the broad brush stroke - capturing the data from the unstructured world of conversation - but also being able to be granular - who are the influencers and who do they influence. Their overall Marketing and Customer Experience toolsets are incredibly deep, play to their strengths, and are potential market leaders, especially around customer experience and now, social network analysis, a particularly exciting tool that will help identify key influencers in its positive role and do fraud detection in its preventive role. Additionally, they are finally starting to pay attention to mind share, using the incredibly capable Angela Lipscomb to reach out to analysts etc. This is just a start. All in all, SAS finally is making the social CRM grade long overdue but a beginning. But what makes me reluctant is what always has. I think

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that they continue to be deficient in how they position themselves in the market. Their approaches are bland and traditional, no matter how hard they try to spice them up or make them relevant. The best they achieve is cute with their You Can ads. While I understand tradition there is a comfort level that 30 years of business success provides - what I dont understand is why SAS, which has exceptional products when it comes to customer experience, dont build their campaigns and channels to the rhythm of the social customers expected experience. Everyone else is doing or attempting to do just that. My concern is thus - even with a great product set, if you dont market well, if you dont capture mind share - if you dont feel the beat of the social customer, you can suffer. So 2010 puts SAS in a great but dangerous place, They are nailing it with their products but they have to step up with a much better go to market strategy. They are doing a few things in that direction. Hopefully, because I really like companies that treat their employees well, they will succeed.

resembles but is not as strong as salesforce Chatters social feeds - allowing you as an internal customer to subscribe to activity within the company. Their open source developers community SugarForge had one of its members create a connector to allow Twitter users to tweet inside the Sugar system. SugarForge has been a rich source of capabilities for SugarCRM. They alleviate the quality control concerns by making sure that core functionality is developed by internal teams, not SugarForge, though the talent on SugarForge is unmistakable. In addition to their strategy for continuous improvement (though not revolutionary innovation), they also understand that the customer is looking for stability, too. To that effect, in 2009, they changed their pricing with Community Edition remaining free, Pro at $360 per user per year, and Enterprise at $600 per user per year. Thats right. Per year. They decided to go to a completely partner-driven sales model which, given their past history with partner programs, was a difficult move to make. Larry Augustin, in a useful video interview with the VAR Guy, claims that twothirds of SugarCRMs revenue comes from the channel now - which indicates to me that one-third comes from direct sales. Perhaps they are rethinking a pure partner channel, or else its just a long transition to make. One thing that sparked their moves was a change of CEO this year which, regardless of merit, creates some turmoil as the new guy who is actually a shareholder of SugarCRM -- Larry Augustin, a very capable guy -- has to stamp the company with his unique signature in order for things to move forward. That takes time - and time is precious in a roiling, ever changing, customer-demanding market - though I have no doubt they will make the changes work for them. However, this is also a big transition year for SugarCRM because they need to stop seeing themselves as the open source CRM alternative. Yes, they are that, but they also are the only real open source player of any consequence and, when it boils down to it, most of the

SuGARCRm
SugarCRM has always been a company well worth watching -- both for their successes and for their somewhat puzzling transformations. From my perspective, as puzzling as they can be, they have been more successful than not and they have had an impact on the market which far exceeds their size. One reason for their success is that they have a lot to offer in the marketplace. Their 30,000-strong development community and the release of a strong new version in SugarCRM 5.5 bode well for them. Theyve been adding Cloud Connectors that will tie the Sugar system to third party data sources including Hoovers, Jigsaw and Zoominfo - all smart choices. They have a strong mobile administration capability and many mobile vendors are tying their apps to SugarCRM, as are social vendors like InsideView. They have a social feed builder of sorts that

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regular players now have open source components which mitigate an open source CRM alternative as something of great value. Which means open source is less of a differentiator than it used to be. Plus, they have some very aggressive goals in 2010, looking to double their business which is pretty aggressive no matter how you cut it. Their very success means that they have to position themselves differently in the market place. Theyve defined the open source market in CRM. They now have to prove that they provide more than that. They provide a flexible, well-supported platform that can be delivered in any way the customer likes - on premise or on demand for a justifiable price. While they remain deficient in social tools as of now, its to their credit that they are getting started there. But whether or not they can come up with a clear way of differentiation beyond Open Source remains to be seen. They are a talented, exciting bunch. Now comes the tough part.

the Social CRM market and to some thought leadership in the space also, which is highly unusual for a vendor company of their size. Theyve done a very good ebook on Social CRM (registration necessary). They tout a Social CRM Virtuous Cycle (a kind of very coolly medieval name) which places customer service at the pinnacle of Social CRM - which, while probably a little bit self-serving, is also probably right. Their long-standing (such as it is) strategy deserves some kudos, too. Among other aspects, theyve been integrating with the more traditional (whatever that means) CRM systems. For example, they now are partnered with marketing automation up and comer Marketo and with Eloqua (see above). Another aspect: Theyre integrated with salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand. But their strategy goes well beyond simple integration with CRM or social systems. Its probably best reflected by the Marketo alliance really, which is a way of providing the missing pieces that a company might need - as components or as a platform. Helpstream defines itself as the in betweenness (though thats my term, not theirs) when it comes to Social CRM. Their strong workflow and business rules engine can be an asset to companies that are trying to provide social tools but have no workflow or business rules engine - a necessary CRM component. Their customer communities can be used as possible components for companies that have a more traditional agent-based model so that the contemporary and traditional approaches to customer service can meld. Using the model they seem to have with Marketo, they provide the customer service component of a Social CRM suite, while Marketo provides the marketing pillar. (NB: For some reason, Marketos sales pillar is the Salesforce. com Twitter integration, which is one of the reasons that Marketo is on my revisit list, not my watch list). All in all,

hELPSTREAm
In 2009, Helpstream was one of the companies that I saw as a harbinger of things to come - a company whose products actually reflected Social CRM with a focus on service communities as a business model for companies. Even though they were light on agent-based capabilities in any traditional sense, they had enough chops to integrate a strong workflow and business rules engine so that problems that customers raised or even solved could be routed to the appropriate parties or service answers could be integrated into a knowledge base. In other words, they were a solution with a new model that was gaining credence as they delivered the model. But that hasnt only been the strength of their solution. CEOed first by Tony Nemelka and then Bob Warfield, they had two intellectually strong leaders who have led them to a buzzworthy leadership position when it came to

Helpstream is a company that provides solid products/ services, has an interesting and differentiable strategy and, a rarity, has a strong visionary leadership.

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But I do have a problem with them, though its not a problem the way you might think of one. Simply put, I cant get a handle on how well or poorly they are actually doing. Ive seen their ROI numbers, when it comes to customer community solutions for customer service problems. They have a nice looking customer list with a number of high tech customers and some marquee names like Toshiba and Johns Hopkins. But what I dont know and cant seem to find out is how is exactly how they are doing - what their pipeline is like, how customers are responding, what their revenue numbers are, what they are planning for 2010, and how big their base is. Some of that is private company lip lock - I get that. But some of it should be exposed and is just downright puzzling as to why I cant find it. They are going to need to step up their public exposure next year if they are to continue to be a leading voice in social CRM. But I remain bullish on these guys because I know what they have. What they do is the question that I hope they answer in 2010.

exceeds the best SaaS products on the market. They are deficient in two areas - first the execution of social capabilities with their CRM platform, something necessary for social customer love. Second, marketing, which seems to be a theme this year. They dont pay enough attention to getting attention in a marketplace that is increasingly defined by the number of messages cluttering up the human individual brain. Attention is a currency in a manner of speaking and its one currency Aplicor doesnt trade in. You can only go so long by doing everything via referral. Thats one avenue among others. Also, just using social media is a limitation that you dont want to have, either. Maybe traditional media isnt cool, but it has some effect on the hearts and minds - though not often that cost-effective. The combination of different traditional and contemporary avenues works best, it seems -- depending on the company. Most importantly, though, mindshare matters. To that end, Aplicor has taken one important step, hiring Chris Bucholz to run a mostly agnostic social channel for them, ForecastingClouds.com - a very wise decision. Chris is one of the true talents in the social CRM world and the reason that the formerly important InsideCRM was important at the time. Now he is Aplicors first step in doing some seriously good marketing and thought leadership. But that, course, is not enough. So well see how Aplicor handles its way-too-low profile in 2010. They got the tools, now lets see the flare.

APLICOR
This is, partly due to themselves, one of the most underestimated companies in the CRM world. They are a longstanding SaaS CRM vendor with a great reputation with their customers, a solid presence in domains like the public sector, and a highly scalable product that has done well enough to create a record revenue year (up 40%) during recessiondriven 2009. They have an incredibly astute and very cool CEO Chuck Schaefer who thinks at the level of a thought leader, rather than just a corporate manager, though he can do that too. Aplicor is a company that knows how to execute. They have deployments in the thousands of users that have been successful over a period of years. They have a product that functionally competes and in some cases

Revisiting Later in 2010

Three month List 1. Unica 2. Cast Iron 3. Zoho (CRM) 4. Marketo 5. Maximizer Six month List 1. Neocase 2. Parature 3. LoopFuse 4. Genius

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Part III: Social Companies and Social Channels

This is going to be my most eccentric set of selections because its a new group coming into an older world and making claims that they may or may not be able to support. That means Im going to look at social entities: Companies that encompass community platforms, social business platforms, social networking platforms, and social media monitoring capabilities. Channels that have taken on the role of locations but locations with a CRM twist as we shall see. Do all the companies that Im going to put on the watchlist meet the claim of being social CRM? No, but who cares? None of the companies or any of the channels meets the criteria for a complete Social CRM technology suite. What they do provide is a more mature and sophisticated capability to support the engagement of customers than weve had in the past which is the strategy that Social CRM supports. Though by no means are we in a mature market - puhleeze.

was Social CRM and who wasnt. My who at this point is who cares? Several of the social vendors who make the Social CRM claim are productively doing what they should to be part of the space. Ive chosen five of them that I think make the grade and are doing everything they can to be worth watching in 2010.

LIThIum
Unlike the bulk of the companies on this watchlist, Lithium actually has done the right things from both a thought leadership and a marketing standpoint to position themselves as a Social CRM company (though I know theyd like to be the Social CRM company). When it comes to creating a market presence, the always charming and smart Sanjay Dholakia, CMO of Lithium, does a really good job. For example, if you remember earlier this year (and if you care at all), Lithium held the First Social CRM Virtual Summit, essentially pulling a coup. They had a superpowered group of speakers at the event - so to speak - including, ahem, me; Brent Leary; Ray Wang: Jeremiah Owyang; and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff (all on my analysts all stars list) among others, and they had a stellar attendance with 1,300 folks, about 450 from outside the U.S. (Ahh, love those virtual environments). Unlike many of the companies on either list, they dont have a problem marketing even though they might overreach when it comes to claiming #1 status. There is no one that has the right to that claim now. Just an FYI. They also are well financed, having just received a Series C funding of $18 million U.S., which will provide them with a lot of latitude when it comes to building out their story including the products they need to deliver. Coupled with their good marketing moves is a solid community platform. First and foremost, because Lithium founder Lyle Fong was one of the worlds greatest gamers, they have a

The Social Companies

In 2009, the social software vendors began to call themselves Social CRM enmasse and rather suddenly. Im not 100% sure why but I have to speculate that there is a lot more money in calling oneself Social CRM than social media and it opens the way into an established $13 billion plus market. Plus, strategically, it allows access to both major enterprise software vendors for partnerships and directly to larger enterprises. Social software originated on the consumer side but the market for them is on the business side - which they clearly are aware of and which will drive a different set of behaviors by them then they are used to. But thats speculative and not meant to be derogatory in any way. That is the reality and they were recognizing the reality of the marketplace. However, that also created a good deal of confusion and some sadly overextended discussions on what was Social CRM (good for awhile and then not so good) and who

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gamers paradigm which means theyve got a terrific interface and scalability in their DNA. While there is no time to get into the details of their product since Id be writing the 5th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light to have the room to do that, I do want to talk about one product component. That would be CRM Connect, their native connector for CRM systems, considered a part of their Social CRM suite. Lithium, I have to presume, used CRM Connect when they integrated several years ago with RightNow. They not only provided the communities for RightNow customers etc. but also the community platform that RightNow used until their acquisition of HiveLive. But and again (there is always a but), the integrations with CRM seemed to have stopped beyond the original RightNow partnership and the usual one with salesforce. com. There doesnt seem to be much other interaction with Lithium and the CRM community that I can see. This isnt meant to go to the strengths or weaknesses of CRM Connect. It might be a great product - or not - but it does go to their strategy here. If they are serious about their Social CRM effort, they need to be aggressively pursuing the more traditional CRM vendors, which is not visible to the naked eye at the moment. Nor do I see them attempting to establish the partnerships for integrations with the social media monitoring tools like Radian6. Their own unstructured data monitoring and capture tools arent particularly exceptional, so those integrations would be wise to say the least. For an enterprise, the value of a community should be twofold. Much greater levels of engagement with the customer (for the benefit of the corporate right brain) and a greater knowledge that can be utilized for customer insight (for the benefit of the corporate left brain) - which means data capture and analysis in support of that insight. Lithium has nailed the former, and has a very narrow focus on the latter - with their very good Reputation Engine which is focused on identifying influencers and key players - valuable unto itself. As good as the Reputation Engine is, it is

by no means enough when it comes to tracking the communitys thinking about a brand or a specific topic. They do have that with Twitter - again a pack follower there - but they could move the game by manifolds if they integrate a scalable engine for social media monitoring with good old fashioned roles and responsibilities administration, and triggers, automated routing - and analysis. Nonetheless, they are an exciting and smart company who could be a serious impact player in 2010. We will see of course. I hope Im right - aside from assuaging my ego, it would be good for the industry.

JIvE
Jive is new to the Social CRM game. Aha! I said Social CRM not Social Business and one of the reasons that they are on this watch list is that they get the difference and are spending 2010 from what Im told by them, seeing customer engagement, not employee collaboration per se, as their prime focus for the year. Which makes them very interesting and worth watching. While I view the difference between social business and Social CRM the way that Esteban Kolsky does, Id say that Jives view of the difference is more techno business focused. They see Social Business as internal and collaborative; i.e., Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM as interaction and engagement with customers -- which means incorporating the tools and pipelines/channels for that engagement into what they are doing. Their 2010 strategy is to provide not just the tools and technology but the ecosystem that companies will need to collaborate with their customers to get some sort of created mutual value. For example, that means a partnership with Bright Idea and Spigit, both providers of innovation management solutions. Their perspective is based on their assessment that the market is moving from visionary buyers (I think they mean

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early adopters and first movers) to pragmatic buyers (meaning those who are seeing the value and looking for ROI). They might be right. But they might be thinking a bit ahead of where the market really is. Additionally, they are working on a strong vertical strategy and also aiming at B2B as part of their 2010 story. They are also improving their Application Framework to be able to pass social information from any system whatever into Jive - which if youre both moving vertical and B2B is something entirely necessary. They began 2010 with the acquisition of Filtrbox, an easy to use, highly scalable solid social media monitoring program that Ive had some experience with. This will be integrated with their SBS 4.0 social business platform and is a significant step toward their customer engagement 2010. They are also moving in the direction of technological development that Im seeing among the social companies in general. They are using their Activity Engine (interaction engine) to look at the social connections of individuals such what they read, write, like, dont like, and who those individuals are following and how relevant all of that can be. Analyzing influentials seems to be a hot trend among the social companies claiming Social CRM. More on that down the road. Jive seems to have thought this one through. This is a company that is well funded, that has a smart and forward thinking leadership and a very good product. This is a company that is in the beginning of an evolution. They are by no means where they want to be when it comes to Social CRM, but they are evolving as the market is evolving so this will be an exciting ride to watch in 2010.

INgage Networks, I had a visceral ugh of a reaction to it. I still cant get used to it, but I understand the strategic reason for them to do so. They are doing well and need to expand internationally and Neighborhood America as a name doesnt do it for world domination. Nonetheless, much as I love them and their people, from executive leadership on down, I was concerned about their plans going forward, which impact inclusion on this list, so I called them and asked for some updates and got them - and I was duly impressed, though I have a concern or two going forward. Since late 2008, INgage Networks took what has been an innovative social network platform built on SOA, and delivered on demand (now in the cloud) and aimed at making it a better and better product. To that end, they started adding what is needed to strengthen its enterprise capabilities. First, analytics - social analytics, performance metrics, opinion analysis (sentiment analysis + social network analysis = opinion analysis) with a focus on identifying key influencers, very much like the Reputation engine that Lithium has - conceptually. Just as important was their emphasis on figuring out how to make social CRM data actionable. The way it was put to me was less technology, more about business problems. A very important initiative coming from this generally creative company. Theyve been making a serious effort to re-engage in the public sector and theyve started to have some real success there - wise for a company that grew up in the public discourse market. Not only is their integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the public sector a success, but they are getting increasing visibility among the leading edge of key Federal government officials in a number of government agencies. These government initiatives, as far as I can tell, have driven INgage Networks to add major enterprise features to their product - something that has been lacking for awhile - such as a data warehouse, process maps and

INGAGE NETwORkS (fORmERLy NEIGhBORhOOD AmERICA)

Neighborhood America has long been a favorite of mine, so when they changed their name to

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SDKs to support those maps plus other tools for ramping up the enterprise pieces. Obviously, there is a lot of value in this for commercial enterprises, too; something which Im sure didnt escape them. They have a long term commitment to integration with other CRM systems, but Im concerned about their ability to move beyond their Microsoft success at this point though not their interest or desire. Theyve made huge strides in the public sector over the past year but I dont see the same strides in the commercial realm - which isnt a good thing. They have a lot of skin in the commercial game and they will need to step it up there to remain competitive. The other area that I think theyve lost some ground is in the realm of thought leadership. Theyve always been visionary as a company thanks to CEO and chief evangelical presence Kim Kobza. But over 2009 their usually prolific intellectual output and their involvement in mind share capture slacked off as they focused on building up their operations strength both internally and externally. So lets see what 2010 brings. I have faith.

fact. It comes in three versions - free, Pro (at $99.00/ user/month) and Team (customized pricing). It provides two primary features - first it monitors intelligence about whats going on in accounts and then it sees who you know in the accounts and monitors whats going on with them (moves to other companies, promotions, etc). It sources the information from the more traditional data sources such as Hoovers and Reuters, the contemporary structured data sources like the community driven Jigsaw and the unstructured such as Twitter and blogs. And thats about it. But they do it well and they are able to use all the resources of the CRM systems they integrate with to optimize the experience that the sales pro has with SalesView. InsideView knows exactly what their product is, so they, unlike so many of the companies on this watchlist, moved aggressively to integrate with CRM systems. As a result, they have partnerships with salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Landslide, and are the first premium partner NetSuite ever had. What makes them even smarter is that theyve created the product so that it can be accessed and used inside whatever CRM system it is integrated with. You never have to leave it. Whats my concern? As good as they are, as focused as they are, they are in the social media monitoring space and that is an expanding and maturing space with nearly 200 companies with SMM products. Someone is bound to come along to compete directly with this smart company. What will they do to separate themselves from the pack? Well see in 2010.

INSIDEvIEw
This one is about as slam dunk as any company on the list. They have been one of the best and smartest and most focused when it comes to providing something valuable to CRM practitioners and vendors that bridges the gap between the traditional CRM needs and social requirement. Providing highly focused social sales intelligence is an art that they seem to have mastered. With their SalesView service, they provide highly focused sales intelligence that is aimed squarely at one thing - supporting sales optimization. They dont have a big product portfolio - their sales intelligence product, SalesView, is their only product in

RADIAN6
Radian6 has been on my radar for a long time, for three reasons. First, they seemed to have the most scalable, and thus the most enterprise friendly (with caveats), social media monitoring service. Second, they seemed to

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want to integrate with CRM. Third, they are headquartered in New Brunswick, which for those of you who flunked geography is one of the Eastern Maritime Provinces of Canada. My wife is from Newfoundland and Radian6 in NB was the closest I was going to get to Newfoundland in the world of Social CRM. So I hooked up with them and found out quite a bit about them in 2009. They had a great product, scalable - their claim was they could monitor 200 million blogs among other things and a strong flexible set of filters. If you know social media monitoring (SMM), a lack of filters could, for example, remove the final M from SMM. Figure it out. If youre stumped, throw in an ampersand between the S and the M. But they had some flaws, too. At the time, they had no sentiment analysis and most of all, no workflow and no business rules engine. Currently, they have an okay execution of sentiment analysis though it could use some work (manual override of the results interestingly enough would be one thing missing) and they still dont have the one thing missing as a must have - a workflow and business rules engine. But they have a product that otherwise is one I have no real hesitation recommending at all. Theyve also made a very conscious effort to integrate with CRM and currently have an integration with salesforce.com and they are actively pursuing the CRM world for further integrations which, given their impressive client list, their quality product and their verve, I have no doubt they will get the interest they need to get those integrations done. I would presume, though I dont know, they are actively speaking with the companies that provide community platforms, since SMM is something that most of the community platforms either dont have or have in a severely deformed way. They are poised to have an impact well beyond the buzz theyve already created in 2010. They are also getting

themselves to be enterprise-ready. 2010 promises to be a huge year for them. There are several concerns in my messenger bag.

1. They have to move forward more quickly when it

comes to a native business rules and workflow engine. Companies like Business Objects SAP, who have enterprise-ready projects, have powerful engines that can handle this automation with ease. Right now they have to integrate with the existing engines of other companies which, due to their strong toolkits, they can do. But its not enough.

2. They have created a rock star kind of persona for

the company because of their incredibly skillful and playful approach to marketing in non-traditional ways. (Remember the Rock Stars of Social CRM last February? I do. I was one of them. YESSS!) But this year they have to start paying more attention to the rest of it. That means reaching out to the influencers more and more, getting visible to the people in the enterprises they want to sell to. Their audience is that, and not the consumer side where much of the coolness factor in social marketing stems from. The mix is killer. A one sided approach is deadly - bad.

3. Finally, they should be thinking about increasing

the number of integrations with CRM and with community platforms this year. If they continue to claim to be Social CRM, then this is a necessity. They are a remarkably complementary offering.

4. For them, though I dont presume to question it,

their pricing might be an issue. They tend to be pricey in a market that isnt terribly so. That may haunt them at some point. Right now, it doesnt seem to be an issue - if you take a look at their client list - exceptional for sure - deservedly so. I think they have huge possibilities in 2010. Are they Social CRM? Just like every other company in all parts of this watch list, thats open to question, but that said, they are part of the industry and a real potential impact player for 2010. Okey Dokey. Now we move onto the 3 months and 6 months Revisit lists. Just to recap. The 3 months list is

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companies that fascinate me but I just dont know much about or I need to see some minor change or watch for further clarity on something lesser. The 6 months revisit list is based on companies certainly worthy of watchlist consideration but they have something that is dramatically unclear to me or they need the 6 months to evolve to where they need to be or I need the six months to check them out.

be discounted - due to what is now becoming a rush to life in the cloud. This is a welcome, new and exciting place because it means realizing the means for live real time data to be grabbed from the sites and close to real time. This serves to further a more accurate customer insight which not only gauges your customers but allows you to optimize their experience with your business. I love this idea. Its a rough one. Its a new kind of watchlist. I might crash and burn with it. But I dont think so. A

Revisiting Later in 2010

Three month List 1. nGenera 2. Kickapps 3. Scout Labs Six month List 1. Gist 2. Xobni 3. Foursquare 4. PeopleMaps 5. Drupal 6. Visible

channel, by nature, is NEVER, on its own, Social CRM, but the development of this kind of channel for a business can become an increasingly important part of the strategy the business crafts for interacting with customers. So Im trying it. Tell me Im wrong. Tell me what I need to do better. Tell me how to refine the thinking and the tools. Point me in another direction. Do something or Ill probably go crazy. Help me build this concept out. Lets roll with this bad boy.

Social CRm and Channels

What Im attempting to do with this section is to look at the channels/locations that are promising for 2010. To get selected, there are two things that need to be in the mix. First, that the channel is a location that potentially has the capacity to provide scalable and multiple communities and, second, potentially it could become a platform for Social CRM via integration with existing CRM systems though it doesnt have to meet the latter standard quite yet if its potential is outstanding. Just to be clear, Im trying something here that is by no means certain to be a good idea or a clear category. I dont have this particular concept fully worked out. Im kind of counting on readers to help me refine it in the interests of nailing down a category that furthers the growth of the customer ecosystem - my master plan - or as Hodgins on Bones would say part of a vast conspiracy. (That would be a conspiracy of one). There is a noticeable growth in the number of community sites who are proceeding to integrate with CRM systems. Thus we have a trend that cant

TwITTER
I doubt that this is particularly surprising. However, I do want to clarify something so that its clear Im not changing my tune. Twitter is not Social CRM. It is a channel that has value to Social CRM strategies and thats what makes it important. There are two reasons that Twitter is a channel of note when it comes to Social CRM strategies. First, it is a terrific bi-directional pipeline for customer contact and conversation. It is also a goldmine for valuable customer data and thus aids insight not just into customer segments and trends, but about individual customers, too. What makes Twitter exceptionally valuable is that it has a really flexible API, which has not only led to CRMish (meaning collaborative) client apps like CoTweet and to a lesser extent Hootsuite, but a whole host of integrations with CRM platforms - mostly that want to monitor, capture and analyze the customer Twitter stream. For example, SAP has integrated Twitter stream monitoring and senti-

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ment analysis using the Business Objects Insight product to handle the traffic. But integration hardly stops there. Twitter streams are integrated with salesforce.com, RightNow, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a nearly infinite group of other players. In fact, the only major CRM vendor that I find doesnt integrate Twitter is Sage. Why Im not sure, though I dont doubt theyre planning it....right? They are....arent they? The Twitter API is strong enough to introduce at least independent client products that look at customer analytics (simple ones), brand and service monitoring of the conversations by customers, collaborative employee/ customer capabilities, and even Twitter-specific social network analysis which actually monitor Twitter influence. Most of the latter applications are somewhat misleading because they use rudimentary algorithms to create artificial levels of influence which ultimately get based on the quantity of followers rather than the quality and context. One that is refreshingly simple and yet somewhat useful is the Hubspot (see below) Twitter Grader, though its not a true Reputation Engine and shouldnt be mistaken for one. So Twitter functionally provides what is a large and maturing channel for Social CRM strategies - not indispensable for all sectors by any means as a bidirectional pipeline, but increasingly important and one that highly emotional industries like retail or sports or telecommunications cant ignore. The problem? Its whether or not they are going to survive, despite their popularity. Twitter still hasnt figured out how to monetize itself. They have no business model. They remain afloat on their promise and their popularity. But, if they figure it out, watch out. It will continue to be an indispensable channel to involve for those working on their Social CRM strategies.

gathering place for customers (in business terms, that is) is indisputably valuable. Every retailer, every CPG company, every team, every...everybody has a fan page on Facebook. Coca Cola for example, the paradigm Facebook success, has as of this writing some 4,137,430 fans on a very sophisticated page. When pages are successful they take on the characteristics of subcommunities really - a community of interest typically. Facebook is not only marketing manna, but it is also used for traditional CRM efforts - customer service (though not as effectively as Twitter) and even sales can be somewhat driven by Facebook- meaning you can use a fan page to access ecommerce or get ads to targeted audiences. One reason for the proliferation of some 350,000,000 Facebook users and as a must-have site for customer engagement communities is a brilliantly robust API and a smart move by founder Zuckerberg to open the API to independent developers a couple of years ago. Its made Facebook perhaps the most influential social channel in the world. Perhaps. As far as CRM related technology integration, its very similar to Twitter but not as widespread. While the entire universe is once again moving toward integrating Facebook profiles into CRM data stores and customer records, the conversations on Facebook are being captured primarily through the social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 who are integrated with CRM customer records and data stores. One degree of separation from Mark Zuckerberg. But even that is being remedied. The first integration with CRM that had any real value was done by Clara Shih, formerly at salesforce.com and now the CEO of Hearsay Labs as well as the author of best seller The Facebook Era, when she created Faceforce (now Faceconnector) in 2007. That triggered a huge amount of interest in the technical integration of CRM and Facebook. The idea of Facebook as a strategic location

fACEBOOk
Facebook as a social channel - a

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had existed for quite awhile by that time. After all, it was an obvious place where customers hung out, though pretty much in a bit of an undifferentiated way. Claras pioneering efforts led to other vendors doing that kind of integration. One interesting and notable current integration is in Sages ACT! 2010 Premium - where you have embedded access to a Facebook (among other social networks) social profile for your customers in accounts, right at your fingertips. The potential for the social network as part of an engagement strategy is immense, obvious and tricky. There is no question as to Facebooks value there. Its potential as a location/pipeline/channel for both engagement and information in a technical sense is great - because the API is robust (even provides potential for location services) and flexible. Its potential to integrate beyond the social profile and into the news feeds is also great though nascent at this point. Its potential as a CRM platform unto itself remains to be seen because as of now there are no players in that market, though I dont doubt that something will happen there sometime. But what is in doubt with Facebook is twofold and troubling. First, what is harped on constantly - their business model - how will they make money? Their vehicle to revenue seems to be highly targeted and personalized advertising. They are already doing that with an expected final revenue number of $550 million for 2009. But honestly, thats not very much, given their popularity. And how theyve handled their desperation for revenue leads to my biggest concern of all - how theyve butchered the handling of privacy. Im not going to dwell on it here. Ive written on it a lot. If you want details, go here, here and here, among many others. Mark Zuckerberg, once again, made a statement which is, oddly true and yet also, once again, clueless when he justified Facebooks insane behavior in multiple

places by declaring the new social norm for everyone as the willingness of people to exposure personal information. Perversely, hes right. People clearly are willing to expose more personal information than ever before. But what he constantly misses in his desperate effort to make money is that, when it comes to entities like Facebook, those same people trust that the information will be used in a prudent way - and those same people think while I am willing to expose the information, I still own that information. Its not public property. Mr. Z. doesnt get the distinction. Thats why on the one hand as a social channel, I see Facebook not only as viable, but as one of the most important channels for integration into a Social CRM strategy, and as a potential goldmine for customer data - with permission of the customer of course. However, the incredible repetition of errors based on desperation to meet the market value of the company squarely with revenues that support it -- makes me wonder too. 2010 isnt necessary the determinant year. Theres too much going on in the world and they are too big to really see things resolved by the end of the year. They are well worth watching, though - either for their immense possible value or as a wow, I see the train wreck coming ahead and they dont. Well see.

SkyPE
This one is probably the biggest surprise on the list and the one that Im least certain about - given their corporate demeanor, apparent strategy and sometimes buggy stable releases. Yet, Im totally excited about their possibilities despite all that. But to get to why, lets look at the why not. Skype begins with one big disadvantage and a second smaller one. The big disadvantage is while they have an API, it doesnt

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seem to be as flexible or easily available as say, Twitters. Second CRM vendors notably are not integrated into the Skype community - I would imagine because of some architectural issues but also because Skype is seen (rightly, given its origins) as a VOIP peer-to-peer technology and not particularly a community platform. Yet, Skype has a lot of surprises. For example, did you know they did $175 million in revenue in the 3rd quarter of 2009? Wow. But not that critical to the watchlist criteria for CRM. Second, and really, really, really important, Skype has 521 million users -- making it 50% bigger than Facebook. That would be roughly one twelfth of the entire world. That staggering number alone gets it inclusion as a social (CRM) channel to watch because of the infinite possibilities. I think that what is not all that apparent but should be considered in all discussions around Skype is that Skype has morphed from a VOIP ground-breaking technology, to a platform for communities based on a unified communications platform. Please note the caveat that technically, Skype is not a robust unified communications platform in the strictest sense of the word. They approximate that. But they have the possibility of being a lynchpin in a full blown UC effort with a community of active users available that has always been a hallmark of the product. Their community building tools (not called that) are enough to generate these ad hoc social nets that Skype natively supports - whether consciously or not. What do I mean? Glad you asked. Between native Skype functionality and such collaboration focused vendors as Inner Pass, Skype has the capacity to create on-the-fly, outcome-based social networks that have privacy and conferencing capabilities. There are tens of thousands of these ad hoc social networks on Skype as of now and the possibility exists for millions of them. That said, Skype has major drawbacks as least as far as this Social CRM watchlist goes. First, they dont have a strategy for native integration with CRM at the community

level. Even at the VOIP product level, aside from Skype being made available as a general channel, I only see Infusionsoft make an effort to truly integrate Skype. It is not of that much interest as a customer channel to CRM vendors. That will hurt. Additionally, Im not sure that Skype management cares to integrate. The tools are not that great (according to those I trust who have tried to use them) and it is not a channel in the excited state that Twitter or Facebook are. However, there are hundreds of thousands of people, creating tens of thousands (estimated of course) ad hoc social networks, with a potential 521 million able to do that easily. That alone is worth watching.

GET SATISfACTION
Get Satisfaction, currently run by the dynamic and incredibly smart Wendy Lea, started out with a unique model. If you were a legitimate employee of a legitimate company, you could officially or unofficially start a customer service community to serve the customers of the specific company you represented. The idea was to then drive customer traffic for a specific company to the companys community on the site to discuss issues or resolve problems that the customers were having with the company. The concept was that the customers had the opportunity to solve the problem amongst themselves (crowdsourcing) and that the company was providing a deeper level of engagement. To that end, Get Satisfaction provided the tools to build the community including knowledgebases (i.e. FAQs), forums, ranking, rating and comments engines, community moderation tools, and some analytics. A smart move. They also provided a wide and flexible pricing scheme based on profiles of certain types of companies. The pricing went from a free version to an $899 per month version. The free version was for Companies just getting started, pet projects, and people without any money. The $899 version was for Companies and organizations that

25

need to manage and extend their brand. (Whatever that means exactly) What made this both unique and controversial was the crowdsourcing aspects of producing and policing a support community. Anyone from a company had the right to set up a community. In fact, a customer could set up a community to discuss a brand if they wanted. This, of course, twisted several corporations in knots. A customer service community that rested outside the firewall that was set up by an unsanctioned employee was a scary thought for a company - with some good reason for that. The controversy occasionally exploded such as one incident with 37Signals in early 2009. But those were few and far between, frankly. Get Satisfaction takes a great deal of care with making sure that the companies whose employees respond are secure in their comfort with this model. In fact, they encourage companies to own their own brands customer service site. After all, they attract over 2 million unique visitors per month, which is a serious traffic flow of customers who have something to say. As a result, they have hundreds of companies who maintain an official site for customer service with them. A unique model to say the least, and producing enough revenue and interest to land them a new $2.3 million round of funding this month. But that wouldnt be enough to get them onto my watchlist frankly. However, Wendy and company realize the value of the information that the customers are providing about the brand and began to think about ways to capture and track that data as it accumulated. Their solution was integration with CRM. The first was salesforce.com announced as part of the AppExchange this month. What makes it more interesting is that theyve moved forward with two other CRM vendors - not the typical choices - but really good choices nonetheless. They are small business helpdesk provider Zendesk and contact center up and comer Parature. Unusual integration choices, but pretty damned good ones.

Parenthetically, they are integrating with Google Apps and Facebook - not CRM, but wise choices also. All in all, this is a good company with a very good approach to customer service in a time when the value of good customer service is being recognized universally as the ne plus ultra of corporate customer engagement. This is a very interesting company in a market that is changing. What was a network of branded customer service communities is transforming into another community platform with the communities built in. Remarkable and worth watching to see if this savvy moves works as advertised.

huBSPOT
Hubspot is the best known unknown Ive ever known. They do what they do fabulously. If I ask you right now (no peeking ahead!) what Hubspot does, Ill bet that most of you cant tell me. Yet, they are spectacularly good at it. And have the audiences to prove it. They are a cloud based platform (or, you can call it a system, if you want) that is dedicated to inbound marketing. They are masters of getting the customer to come to you. They have an online location at Hubspot.com that rents space (i.e. provides services and subscriptions) so that you can create a customized presence based on luring (in a good way) customers to you. For example, they are Brent Learys and my sponsor for CRM Playaz. They have two books out, one on inbound marketing and another on using social media - both smart, well written, and loaded with practical easy to read (and do) advice. They have a business office with an extraordinary and very contemporary corporate culture that encourages both team behavior and individual creativity and a relaxed but focused work environment. They have the muscle to back up what they do also. For example, CRM guru and SMB star Brent Leary did a

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Revisiting Later in 2010

Three month List 1. Amazon - Amazon worlds best cloud platform, but how it plays into CRM except as a host provider, remains to be seen. Im guessing that, as potent as their cloud platform is - and as popular - they will end up doing nothing but hosting CRM - not integrating or building it. So their success will remove them from this list. 2. Google - As a growing cloud apps provider and even platform to some extent, Google has the benefit of world recognition and great programmers and tons of advocates. But wheres CRM? Theyll have to have that in order to succeed in the enterprise. Take a look at Lawrence Buchanans What Would Google CRM Look Like for a good portrait of what Google needs. There is a Google CRM product called iFreeTools, which I know nothing about except that its built on the Google Apps engine, covers the three CRM pillars, and looks to be simple. Six month List 1. Slideshare.net - Theyve been revamping their approach and done what they have to do to ramp up specific types of communities that appeal to specific roles e.g. business, professional speaker, etc. Theyve also added business services so that they can make money. They are a very interesting play due to their successful crowdsourcing with business appeal, but it remains to be seen how successful this YouTube for Old People (my name) does. 2. Linkedin - Theyd be on the watchlist due to their robust API, and solid community approach. But they are still unidirectional -you send a message, the recipient responds with a step in between. Lets just say that while theres a conversation, its one with awkward silences.

webinar on Using Social Media for the SMB. It had 6,500 registrants and 2,800 attendees! Thats a breath-taking number, but what really makes this a great story is that this was only the 5th largest of their webinars in 2009! But what cements this channel to platform is that they are integrated with salesforce.com to both identify leads that come from the inbound marketing campaigns and to track those leads to deal closure. In March 2009, they announced the release of their Hubspot Salesforce Professional Connector, which ties the systems together pretty easily. What Im concerned with is what might be obvious. With the increase in interest in social marketing by the heavy hitting marketing automation vendors like Unica, SAS, and the CRM suite owners - like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc., they are going to start pressing Hubspot, which for all their originality and remarkable capabilities dont have the budgets to get out there and fight with the competition. Luckily for them, they usually take their own advice and thus can do a lot more than most with the dollars they have - and the incredibly competent management team that runs their show. But they are squarely in the middle of what will be a white hot battle in 2010. Let the games begin.

Disclosure
At one time or another, I have had a consulting or thought leadership (meaning speaking at a conference or writing a white paper) relationship with almost all of the CRM vendors, including many companies who were scratched from the list or who appear in the revisit list. As anyone who knows me knows, these relationships have no impact on my thinking or what Im saying here. No one is spared the honey or the jalapeo - if they deserve either or both of them. Paul Greenberg

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The Small Business Ones to Watch Ish List

By Brent Leary For small businesses looking to find, catch and keep customers in 2010, here are the vendors worthy of your attention. I call it the Ish list because in addition to including traditional CRM vendors, it also includes as companies who make products that enhance our abilities to build relationships with customers in the social era. These companies wouldnt be considered CRM vendors in the traditional sense but what they do is very CRM-ish -- with potentially significant impact on our efforts to create engaging customer (and prospect) experiences. succeed. And over those three years their commitment to helping small businesses automate marketing processes (or as they say fix your follow-up) had deepened and matured. Automation is at the heart of InfusionSofts efforts to fix that pesky follow-up problem many small businesses are challenged with. In fact, its a huge issue as most people dont buy from a vendor on their first interaction with them. It can take anywhere from 6-10 interactions (possibly more) before a prospect feels comfortable enough to pull the trigger. Unfortunately many small businesses give up after the first couple of contacts, never giving a prospect enough reason to trust them enough to buy from them when theyre ready. InfusionSofts platform allows you to implement an automated, multi-step follow-up sequence based on information provided by prospects, and actions taken by them. While InfusionSoft includes a great deal of functionality -- including affiliate management, ecommerce and billing management -- they are really focusing on what theyre calling Email Marketing 2.0. Marketing labels aside, their combination of deep workflow automation, multimedia auto responders and traditional CRM contact management ups the ante for small businesses serious about following up. Theyre adding a nice new email authoring tool that simplifies the process of creating emails, and will be providing a template library from High Impact Email that should really help small businesses easily create more attractive communication pieces. And theyve made it easy to import your contacts from Aweber, Constant Contact and 1ShoppingCart. While the product matures and continues to improve, the companys efforts to assist customers in using the application is also improving. Their community site has a lot of

Criteria for making the list

First things first: This isnt a function by function deep dive of hundreds of applications. Although I like to look at everything thats out there in detail, I cant because Im just one dude. But a good number of companies, applications and services caught my attention for various reasons. Im not claiming the ones on this list are the best products or services, but I do think theyre worth of keeping an eye on. Having talked with someone at just about every one of these companies, I can honestly say Im as impressed with the people as I am with the products they provide (or the potential impact they can have) - which is a very important reason for them being on this list. On the whole I think they are trying to do right by the small business crowd, but some do have questions that can only be answered over time. Thats why Im interested in watching what happens this year with these companies. In no particular order

INfuSIONSOfT
Ive been watching InfusionSoft since 2007, and one thing has been very clear from the beginning - they are all about automation and helping small businesses and internet entrepreneurs

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great information, tutorials and videos to help customers get up and running. Their campaign launch pad site helps people to get off to a quick start using the application. They also have a guarantee that if you dont double your sales after a year of using their service, theyll give you half your first years subscription fees back. Last years move to drop the up front setup fee (as much as $5,000) and go with a straight monthly fee model (starting at $199/mo) signaled their seriousness about serving the small business community. And not requiring a long term contract also allows more small businesses to try their service out. There are still some things missing, such as a lack of mobile application, and not much by the way of social media integration. And it will take some time to really get the hang of what you can do with the application. But if you are serious about marketing processes, and willing put some work into doing what it takes to get them properly set up, InfusionSoft should definitely be on your short list.

The first thing you notice about ACT! 2010 is that it has a much fresher look to its user interface. It also is much easier to navigate than previous editions. You can now even view social network profiles from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and others right from within a contact record. This is done through an internal web browser, not a deep integration that some of the other services have. But at least you can view the information along with other contact data you have. While the new interface and ability to view social profiles from within the app are definite pluses, the biggest addition is the new email marketing capabilities. Through a partnership with email service provider Swiftpage, Sage has created a cloud-based e-mail marketing service with templates for designing e-mail, surveys and web forms for gathering feedback. This service also enables ACT! 2010 user to use drip marketing controls for automating campaigns with multiple e-mails, and provides a marketing results tab for identifying qualified prospects based on open and click-through metrics. This is a significant development, and should serve as a major catalyst for those ACT! users whove sat out a few upgrade cycles to jump on board. ACT! E-marketing will make it easier for users to stay connected to their contacts, and to easily create new ways to generate leads. Capturing new leads is good, but being able to score leads and run them through an automated nurturing process based on those scores can lead to new business that otherwise would have been ignored. Another game changing development that directly impacted the development of the E-marketing service is the ACT! community. This is one of the more active communities Ive seen in the industry - from both the users and from Sage employees. And from the interaction between Sage and its users (as well as interaction between community members themselves) the need for integrating email marketing into the application became very apparent. Sages responding to the needs of the ACT! community bodes well for the customers -- and for Sage.

SAGE ACT!
It seems like ACT! has been around forever. Being around for 20+ years counts for a lot, because over that time millions of people have built up very important contact databases they depend on every day to cultivate relationships with customers and prospects. Having its roots in a time when nobody outside of defense and academia knew what the Internet was, its no surprise that ACT! is an installed application. But if youre a solo salesperson, ACT! has everything you need to track activities, manage opportunities and keep up with customer information. And if youre an Outlook user as well, theres good integration between the two apps. Sage kept adding functionality with new versions of the software, but it had a stale look and feel compared to some of the SaaS offerings that have taken over the market. But that has changed with the latest version of the software - ACT! 2010.

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Sage still needs to figure a SaaS strategy for ACT!, and while there are third-party tools for using ACT! on mobile devices, its time for Sage itself to provide an affordable, easy to use mobile solution to their large customer base. Theyve also got to do a better job of integrating social profiles into the application. But theyve made some big strides over the past year. And they are showing a great deal of interest in what their users are saying. This should help them hold on to those whove invested so much time building up their ACT! databases. Who says you couldnt teach an old guy a new trick?

product, as evidenced by rough customer reviews left on the product website. But, theres enough here to think Intuit is serious about making Customer Manager a solid addition to their family of products. Theyve made it very affordable to use, at $9.95/mo for up to 5 users. That includes mobile access, which was pretty easy to install and get up in running. And their customer base is looking to them to provide a viable service that ties into their Quickbook information. If Intuit can quickly add some of the traditional sales and marketing automation pieces, and Outlook integration, this could go a long way towards turning a significant number of Quickbooks users into Customer Manager fans.

INTuIT CuSTOmER mANAGER

Over four million small businesses use Quickbooks to keep their books. So when Intuit rolls out a new product aimed at the small business market, its definitely worth watching. When they introduced Customer Manager in November, you had to take notice. Intuits first go around with contact management back in 2003 fell short of expectations. It was a clunky installed app that never got any traction. This go around, theyve created a SaaS offering that automatically syncs with Quickbooks (2009 and 2010), offers a shared calendar, and is accessible from the iPhone and a few BlackBerry models. The actual functionality in Customer Manager is basic - very basic. Theres no lead management, opportunity management or email marketing capabilities. There are also no social networking hooks, and no integration to Microsoft Outlook. So this not on the same level of contact management as ACT! 2010. What makes Customer Manager worth watching is to see how Intuit develops it over the course of this year. Its still very early on, and it has some missing pieces that need to be added to put it on par with other services on the market. And Intuit needs to manage expectations of a community of users that expect a lot from an Intuit

zOhO
You have to watch what the folks at Zoho are up to, just be prepared to get tired because theres so much to keep up with. The number of online apps they push out is second only to the big G (as in Google). Theyve got it all, from docs, spreadsheets, email, web conferencing, invoicing and a whole lot of other things - including CRM. In fact they have over 10,000 paid customers using their CRM service. Zoho CRM covers the needs of a great number of small businesses looking for the basic needs to manage contacts, activities, leads, and the sales pipeline. You can synch your contacts, tasks and events from Outlook with a plug-in. You can also integrate your Gmail account with Zoho CRM, which makes it possible to send emails with your Gmail account address from within Zoho, and track those exchanges in contact records. Email integration is a common theme among the vendors on this list, because its still an incredibly important channel of communication for business people - especially for small business people. Zoho covers this area very well, and is focusing on integrating more of its apps with the CRM product. Look for chat, document management, and web conferencing to be better integrated into Zoho CRM.

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Also integration with Quickbooks just went into beta, and they have Zoho CRM for Google Apps that adds the ability to use their CRM functionality from within GA. Zoho doesnt have nearly the kind of email marketing functionality that InfusionSoft or ACT! 2010 now have. Its also lacking a mobile solution at this time (that may be changing sooner rather than later), the ability to synch Outlook calendars, or Google contacts. Theres not much by way of social network integration, although theres talk about an upcoming LinkedIn integration. But what you do get for the price (the first three users in a company get it for free, with each additional user at $12/mo.) is great for folks looking for a solid product that covers the traditional CRM areas. And Zoho has the resources and drive to continue building on the product, and creating great options for small businesses.

and even generate quotes with the on-demand edition. And contacts, tasks events created in Prophet are natively stored in Outlook, meaning no need for synching. Prophet adds a bunch of CRM functionality that Outlook users can use to manage sales opportunities and collaborate with other team members. But many people dont need the CRM functionality Prophet brings to Outlook; they just want to get a better handle on the people theyre interacting with. Xobni is a tool that makes it easier to find out more about the people youre emailing; Its an Outlook plug-in that pulls in information from social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook to give you a better feel for the people living in your inbox. You can see their Twitter status updates, and information on their company from Hoovers. And if youre a Salesforce.com user, you can even view contact data from within Outlook. Xobni also provides some interesting statistics to help you understand the strength of your relationships with your inbox inhabitants. The free Xobni Outlook plug-in has been downloaded over 4 million times, which shows just how many people are interested in building on their investment in Outlook. And the growing interest in CRM-ish services by small businesses should be good for companies like Avidian and Xobni. Right now the mobility support for both these apps isnt great. According to its website, Prophet mobile runs on Palm and Windows Mobile devices - two platforms that are on the losing end of the smart phone fight. Xobni is currently in beta with BlackBerry app, but no word on when youll be able to run the app on an iPhone or Android phone. And Prophet doesnt have email marketing blast capabilities of Infusion or ACT! 2010. But if the foundation of your relationships with customers and prospects reside in your Outlook inbox, Prophet OnDemand extends what you can do with those relationships, and Xobni gives you a better handle on who the people actually are.

AvIDIAN PROPhET AND XOBNI

Its still very apparent that many small businesses, salespeople and solopreneurs depend heavily on email to stay connected with customers and prospects. As much as we talk about tweets, videos and blogs, most of the 1-to-1 interactions happen on the phone or via email. And Microsoft Outlook is still the most popular email client, with upwards of half a billion people using it to manage relationships - one email at a time. So weve invested a lot in Outlook, and will probably continue to do so. But it doesnt help you manage sales opportunities, automate workflow, or provide reporting capabilities like CRM applications do. Avidian Technologies Prophet OnDemand (personal edition $19.95/mo, enterprise edition $49.95/mo per person) is a tool that integrates with Outlook to extend its capabilities to provide these things and more. With Prophet, you can automate follow-up emails, workflow actions based on sales stages,

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BATCh BLuE AND GIST

The better known contact mangers and CRM application vendors have been around a long time -- long before Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Communications have changed so much in such a short amount of time, traditional apps and the vendors behind them are rapidly trying to integrate social data into their tools and services. But there are a whole bunch of new companies that were created with social in their DNA. There are way too many of these to name here that are doing some cool things, but Ill give a shout out to a few that deserve some attention - Bantam Live, WeCanDoBiz, Network Hippo and Co-Tweet are among the social native crew that are doing some interesting stuff. And it will be interesting to see how they progress of the next year. The two social natives that Id like to give special mention to here (another Ill discuss later) are BatchBlue and Gist. One Im very familiar with, the other Ive watched over a shorter amount of time - but both are making a name for themselves among the small biz crowd. Gist is kind of like Xobni in that you can use it within Outlook to get a better handle on the people youre swapping emails with. But where Xobnis focus is squarely on Outlook, Gist pulls in information from various social networks and creates a central location on its site - creating a social network with profiles. You can create a free Gist account and import contacts from Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other services. Once imported, Gist then searches for fresh information on each contact to give you a better handle on what this contact is about. Then it uses a formula to continuously rank the importance of your relationship to each contact - which you can manually override if you dont agree with the rankings generated. Gist also pulls in tasks and events you schedule on your Google Calendar, and makes it easy to view detailed

information of imported contacts - and see relationships between your contacts. And you can not only view tweets from the people you follow, you can also tweet (and retweet) from your Gist account as well. And while it is not have traditional CRM functionality, there is an integration with Salesforce.com. It also looks like theyre beefing up the email capabilities, which should prove helpful to users. BatchBlue is the company behind BatchBook - a sociallyenabled online contact management system that is adding CRM functionality, and integrating with other small business application providers through its founding partnership of The Small Business Web initiative. I admittedly have been a big fan of BatchBlue and their dynamic duo - Pamela OHara and Michelle Riggen-Ransom - for well over a year now. For as little as $9.95/month for individual users, BatchBook provides traditional contact management, and allows you monitor your contacts Twitter conversations and read their blog posts right from within the app - and view their Flickr stream of photos. BatchBlue also pioneered the concept of SuperTags - a tag that allows you to form groups of contacts, and create custom fields for the SuperTag to track group information. And these custom fields can be RSS fields, email addresses, multiple choice questions, and other things you may want to track about a group of contacts. BatchBlue also recently announced that theyve added the ability to manage and track leads and sales deals which adds much needed functionality to the service. Being a founding member of The Small Business Web is another reason BatchBlue is one to watch. The forethought of joining MailChimp, Shoeboxed, Outright and Freshbooks in founding this partnership of small business vendors -- taking an oath to make their products work together -- show they know what social is all about. Partnering with a growing number of service providers through the SBW initiative extends BatchBlues ability to give their customers functionality, while staying focused on their core business. This is a great example of how small businesses can leverage social strategies to grow their businesses.

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huBSPOT
Over the last 3+ years, few companies have impressed me more than internet marketing platform provider Hubspot. My first interaction came via email from co-founder Brian Halligan back in 2006 when he and Dharmesh Shah were just starting the company. They were all about helping small businesses leverage the web to build an effective presence to attract customers and prospects. Mike Volpe joined them soon afterward and the three were off to the races creating a company that now has over 100 employees dedicated to helping small businesses understand the values of what they call Inbound Marketing. Yeah the Three Inbound MarketeersI know. I wont use that one again. Hubspot is an important company to watch for a variety of reasons. Thousands of small businesses use their platform to run their websites, create and optimize landing pages, do keyword research, create landing pages, blog, and nurture online leads. You can monitor social networks for conversations important to your businesses, analyze just about any site activity and its impact on lead conversion, and analyze incoming links to see how what impact theyre having on your site. If that werent enough, you can also do a fair share of competitive intelligence to understand where you stand versus your competitors. The product itself would warrant their being a company worth watching, but what really makes them important is the wealth of knowledge they share through the content they create. Their Grader tools (Website Grader, Press Release Grader, Twitter Grader, Book Grader, etc.) are some of the most helpful free tools available. Their internet marketing blog is full of valuable information best practices, and practical information you can use - whether youre a Hubspot customer or not. Their webinars attract thousands of people at a time because of the quality information provided. And their research papers - like the State of Facebook for Business - are must reads for anyone wanting to understand how to leverage social

networks to create business opportunities. While Hubspot is not a traditional CRM provider, they do integrate with Salesforce.com to get the benefits of more robust needs for opportunities and pipeline management. But one thing you do get from Hubspot is support in making the most of the application. You have access to knowledgeable people to get you up to speed on using all the available tools for designing the site, and blogs, finding keywords and building optimized pages. There are a number of online videos available, and an active community of users that help each other get the most out of using the application. Its kind of ironic that I have never heard Hubspot refer to themselves as a social CRM company. I say this because they have just as much right to that claim as anybody Ive seen out there. But I think theyre OK with the whole Inbound Marketing thing. Whatever you call them, just remember to keep your eyes out for anything they do. Youre likely to learn something important.

ThE wILDCARDS: GOOGLEfORCE

No Im not predicting Google will buy Salesforce. com - I did that already a couple of times. While they have partnered on a few things Ive moved on from that prediction, particularly now with Salesforce raising a half billion dollars recently. But these two companies still need watching from a small business CRM perspective, dont they?

Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is still the poster child for CRM. When they make a move, people analyze how it will impact the industry. If Marc Benioff so much as coughs, people try to read something into it. So it makes sense that Salesforce should be on a list like this. So why did I wait so long to include them?

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Even though Salesforce is pulling in bigger deals from bigger companies, a third of their business still comes from the little guys. But Ive heard from a number of small businesses wondering if the allure of bigger deals is taking attention away from them. I recently had a chance to talk with Sean Whiteley - Salesforce VP, Services Cloud Product Marketing. He said their recent release of Contact Edition was made to address the huge market (24 million or so) of sole proprietors in the US. He said theyve heard from the micro-business crowd that they needed a basic service at a price point that made it possible for them to start on the CRM path. The $5/month per user price tag makes that possible, and gives Salesforce customers a path that goes up to Group Edition and Professional Edition if necessary. Whitely also pointed to relatively new small business site with information on the products geared to small business folks. He also mentioned a new small business community site that will be coming shortly to help facilitate an area where there small business customers can learn from Salesforce.com and other customers to get the most from using the service. After talking with Sean, I think this year will be one to watch to see how aggressively Salesforce.com goes after this market. Will they add functions to the lower editions that small businesses will get from other vendors? Also, will they put time in effort into supporting the little guys, and their small business properties, to win over the hearts and minds of this group? Theyve got a lot going on, so it will be interesting to see how important it will be to Salesforce. com to get into good graces with very small businesses.

shooting emails back in forth in Gmail, you can connect them through Google Reader as well and see what theyre reading - which provides you an opportunity to share content that would be of interest to them. YouTube now prompts you to subscribe to channels of the people you communicate with Gmail. And more apps are integrating with Gmail because of the growing number of people using the service. Google FriendConnect makes it easy for folks to become a member of your blog. And Sidewiki is making it easy to share comments on web pages. And then theres Google Wave, which Im starting to see more people use to collaborate in real time. And many of these services have APIs people are developing apps with to tap into - like ZohoCRM for Google Apps. Plus, more people will tap into the Google Contacts API as they develop that service and more people use Gmail and create contacts from those email interactions. So Im guessing that Google is going to be a big player in the CRM space, because it is tied into so many of our daily activities - beyond search. It will be interesting to see how Google CRM-ish activities play out in 2010.

fINAL ThOuGhTS
While social is all the rage and the focus of everything, the focus of many vendors is better integration with email -and email marketing activities. Social is definitely growing in importance, and will probably become even more important to traditional small businesses over the course of the year. But email strikes at the heart of their communication with current customers. Email marketing helps

Google?
What does Google have to do with CRM? More and more each day, it seems, because Google is removing friction from the relationship building process. By

solidify those relationships, while also nurturing relationships with prospects who have shown past interest. And mobility looms large on the horizon.

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