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.
How Cloud Integration Is Defining the Future Of CRM
By: Louis Columbus (@louiscolumbus)
This executive interview with Scribe CEO, Lou Guercia, and VP of Product Management, Betsy Bilhorn, sheds light on the landscape of cloud-based CRM integration and the impact of the API economy. The interview highlights the importance of APIs in facilitating the creation of a 360 degree customer view – APIs provide a logical framework for people to access, share, and integrate data. Equally important for creating effective products in the cloud is increasing the frequency of product updates, reducing release timing from 6-12 months to 2-6 months. And ultimately, companies unlocking the full value of their CRM system must use integration platforms to connect with the rest of their business systems, basing their platform choice on maximum usability and performance.
The Integration Dilemma
By: Barry Devlin (@BarryDevlin)
With integration now a necessity for driving business outcomes, this article from Barry clarifies three functional aspects of integration necessary for success. The first of the three aspects is prior integration, which involves consolidating data storage before using the data for business purposes. Immediate integration, as the name suggests, consists of accessing data in real time to perform queries and return results in a single answer. The last of the three, concept integration, is required to transform data into information and, according to Barry, “enables the integration of integration itself.” Concept integration is the most complex of the three aspects, and enables understanding and interpreting business meaning on the go – this is the stage of integration that truly drives the bottom line when done properly, the stage that integration platforms like Scribe facilitate.
LinkedIn, Dynamics CRM and Social Selling
By: Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan)
These days all CRM is social, and all selling is social. Jukka touches on the frequent lack of integration between CRM and social networks like LinkedIn, which inhibits the productivity of salespeople. Without a standardized method for fully integrating LinkedIn with CRM, many companies don’t take advantage of the benefits that come with a deeper customer profile possible using LinkedIn data, and Jukka goes through various methods for integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn. Methods range from integrating the LinkedIn Member Profile badge onto a CRM contact form, to utilizing the “LinkedIn for Microsoft Dynamics CRM” app, to getting around LinkedIn’s API rules to fully integrate their data into your system.
Gartner Forecasts Increasing Popularity of Downloadable Mobile CRM Apps
By: Aatif Sulleyman (@theSulleymander)
As I mentioned in an earlier CRM recap, Gartner predicts a 600 percent growth in the number of mobile CRM apps available by 2014, indicating a drastic shift in how we access our customer data. This shift, along with Gartner’s prediction that over half of CRM software revenue will come from SaaS offerings by 2016, points to a paradigm shift in our industry, where data access whenever and wherever it is needed becomes a priority, and the underlying infrastructure needed for on-premise solutions loses importance. Cloud-based SaaS offerings enable businesses to get their CRM systems up and running faster and more cost-efficiently than previously possible, and the cloud extends the value of CRM to the increasingly on-the-go mobile worker.
Salesforce Q1 Earnings: in Line; $893m Revenue
By: Andrew Nusca (@editorialiste)
Salesforce just announced their Q1 2013 earnings, meeting analyst projections for expected earnings per share. Key numbers include a 29 percent year-over-year increase in subscription/support revenues, a 25 percent increase in professional services and other revenues and a 28 percent increase in overall revenue. The numbers point towards increasing adoption of cloud-based SaaS offerings as a strong growth driver, and Salesforce is forecasting Q2 revenue of over $930 million – about 27 percent higher than last year. If Salesforce perfects its Marketing Cloud this year, I expect revenues to increase even more rapidly.
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.
