The Revolution in CRM Architectures and Technology
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Sep 13, 2008
At the Gartner CRM Summit 2008, Gartner analyst John Radcliff presented The Revolution in CRM Architectures and Technology. His "Aha!" slide indicated the following top-ten priorities for organizations to consider this year (based on a survey of Gartner analysts):
- Web 2.0
- Cost/Growth/Innovation
- SaaS
- Modernization of applications
- SOA/SOBA/SODA/EDA/BPP
- CE/CRM
- Application governance/PPM
- Business process discipline
- Application architectures
- MDM/EIM
For Web 2.0, John discussed communities and social networks, saying "the digital native has arrived". Web 2.0 will have an increasing impact on CRM, as digital natives ("Generation V", those who have grown up with the Web) become customers and employees. Online communities now provide consumers with a way to make their voice heard by leading brands.
For the move to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), John discussed the significant growth in on-demand CRM suites. (For us at Vovici, our software sales have declined even faster than we budgeted for, due to the significant shift and increase in our SaaS sales.) While there are contrarians out there, SaaS is winning over more and more organizations.
Enterprise feedback management, while not explicitly included in the Top 10 (next year!), was included, and mentioned, within CE (Customer Experience) technologies.
For mobile devices, John pointed out that handsets are driving the Mobile Web: there are 200 million notebook computers with excellent browsing experiences, but 1.5 billion handsets, with 35% providing good web browsing experiences and 50% providing reasonable browsing experiences.
John discussed the evolution from UIs to UXs, from user interfaces to user experiences, granting users ever greater control of their applications, with wider accessibility to the applications from multiple platforms.
He concluded with evaluations of each of the major CRM vendors, and how well they achieved SOA, either as a wrapper around existing applications or as a fundamental redesign of an SOA platform.
John had a lot of good content, but if you were playing "buzzword bingo", you would have your had best chance of winning during his presentation!