Best of CRM: June 8th

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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.

Salesforce to Acquire ExactTarget: I Now Pronounce you Marketing Cloud
By: Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe)
In a move to extend their comprehensive Marketing Cloud offering, Salesforce just announced their plan to acquire marketing automation provider ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. The acquisition marks Salesforce’s move to create a complete ecosystem with their Marketing Cloud. What this tells me is that as acquisitions continue and competition gets tougher, leading ISVs in CRM, marketing automation, customer services and finance need to increase the relevance of their apps through easy, effective integration to remain relevant players.

Scribe Gives ‘Mary in Marketing, Sarah in Support’ Integration Capabilities
By: Loraine Lawson (@lorainelawson)
Loraine’s executive Q&A with Scribe CEO Lou Guercia details the company’s unique approach to customer data integration, focusing on the creation of role-based personas across sales, marketing, finance and customer service departments. Lou also underscores the importance of social collaboration for ongoing integration projects and the revolutionary visual programming interface available with Scribe’s integration services update to the Scribe Online Platform. Customer data plays a critical role in all companies, and making that data easily accessible for any user that needs it will act as a differentiating factor for successful companies moving forward.

Firms Are Out of Sync on IT-Business Integration
By: Dennis McCafferty
This slideshow on the new State of Data Integration 2013 report highlights key findings from the study. Important to note for marketers, CRM systems have the highest reported pure cloud deployments of all core business systems at 26%. On the flip side, 64% of business respondents lack a formal process for evaluating CRM data integration, making ROI hard to calculate and slowing down the transition to a connected business. With only 16% of businesses reporting full integration among customer facing systems, companies have a long way to go before reaching the elusive 360 degree customer view, and integration providers will play a key role in facilitating the connected enterprise.

Digital Government 2013: The Integrated, Responsive Agency Powered by Unified Customer Data
By: Libby Bishop
IT deployment across businesses, and particularly government organizations, is increasingly shifting from purely on-premise to hybrid environments as the cloud gains a stronger foothold. With this shift come new integration challenges. Libby’s case study of the North Carolina League of Municipalities integrating their Microsoft Dynamics CRM system with Dynamics NAV and 10+ legacy systems shows how companies can effectively engage in hybrid integrations to increase employee productivity, save hundreds of thousands of dollars and easily manage data across the organization.

SAP to Buy E-Commerce Firm
By: Maureen O’Gara (@MaureenOGara)
In line with the consolidation of service providers, SAP is entering the CRM space with their acquisition of Hybris, which will allow them to deploy a next-generation e-commerce platform and help SAP define the new customer experience. According to Forrester, this acquisition marks SAP as one of four companies set to dominate the enterprise commerce tech landscape; the list includes SAP, IBM, Oracle and eBay. Combined with Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget and other movement in the industry, expect these massive players to continue buying companies to create fully-inclusive software offerings.


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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