Best of CRM: April 6th

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Every week, we recount some of the best buzz around CRM and data integration. We’ll review our favorite articles and share the most pressing findings or key takeaways from each.

Evolving Social CRM to Become CRM—Again
By: Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky)
With the constant conversations about Social CRM, Esteban points out a key understanding that’s finally sinking in – Social CRM is just regular CRM now. In adapting to the new abilities the “social” aspect of CRM provides, Esteban recommends four critical steps for effective CRM implementation. These include using each channel for its respective purpose, rethinking your strategy within the new capabilities of CRM, focusing on bottom-line metrics over “fluff” metrics like followers, and embracing the change.

Scribe Online Platform Updated with New Visual Interface
By: Jason Gumpert
MSDynamicsWorld’s Jason Gumpert covers the newest version of our Scribe Online Platform, with a focus on the easy-to-use visual UI of Integration Services (IS). With IS, as Scribe’s VP of Product Management Betsy Bilhorn explains, “The concepts (of the customer data integration) are natural language based and easy to pick up if you have any level of technical background – for each record, if this, do that.” This opens up data integration to more users to enable better decision making, lower TCO, and faster realization of benefits.

CRM Winners and Losers
By: Chuck Schaeffer (@cschaeffer)
For those in the market for a CRM system, this post analyzes the relative Buyer Consideration (aka popularity) of the top 15 CRM systems in Q1 of 2013. Not surprisingly, Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics CRM hold top spots by a wide margin (72% and 51% of Buyer Consideration). For those interested in branching out from the two CRM titans, both Infusionsoft and Oracle RighNow are on the rise, but have a ways to go (19% and 5% of Buyer Consideration respectively).

Businesses Can Turn to Scribe for Integration in the Cloud Anytime
By: Mark Smith (@marksmithvr)
In a week full of data integration news (see Mulesoft’s funding), Mark covered another important data integration update – Integration Services (IS) for our Scribe Online Platform. Ventana found that 44% of organizations spend the most analytics time on data-based tasks, meaning that increases in data efficiency and integration can hugely benefit these organizations. Like Jason Gumpert and others have noted, the visual UI of IS greatly simplifies the process of data integration, leading to better, cheaper access to customer data. As Mark puts it, “Scribe Online is a great step forward. Having software that can align business and IT is essential, as less than a fifth (19%) work together well for the information needs of an organization, according to our information management research.”

MuleSoft Rakes in More Moolah to Connect Your Applications to the World
By: Barb Darrow (@gigabarb)
Barb covered this week’s announcement of Mulesoft’s $37 million funding round. The influx of cash into the data integration space is indicative of the massive wave of change coming and the importance of integrating CRM and other customer data systems – Mulesoft CEO Greg Schott estimates the value of connecting all enterprise applications at $500 billion. What’s interesting about these new funds is the fact that Mulesoft raised money from two competitors – Salesforce and SAP – underscoring the recognized need for CRM and cloud providers to connect their services using integration solutions like Mulesoft and Scribe.


We hope you had a great week! We’ll see you again soon with a roundup of all the movers and shakers in CRM and data integration news.

Peter Chase
Peter founded Scribe Software along with Jim Clarke in the beginning of 1996. As Executive Vice President, Business Development, Peter is responsible for establishing and growing partnerships with other leading technology companies in support of Scribe's overall market and product strategy. Prior to founding Scribe, Peter held senior positions in sales, product marketing, and finance at SNAP Software, an early pioneer in CRM software that was acquired by Dun and Bradstreet. He has published numerous articles and whitepapers and is a frequent speaker and panelist at industry events.

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