Time and Place Shifting: The New Suite

CRM companies have been soooo slowwwwww to provide the toolsets for social media and collaboration that I began to look elsewhere to see who would provide the suites for it. For some reason, the entire industry has been acting as if the tools that would allow customers to engage with a company aren't important to, ummmm, customer relationship management. That's the "customer" in CRM which, in case you haven't figured it out CRM industry, equals the "customer" in customer engagement and the "customer" in customer experience and the "customer" in co-creation of value. It always astounds me that in an industry which has driven the mantra "its all about the customer" into the dust of cliche, it's been repeated so much, only one industry leader now, salesforce.com, is even putting their toe in the water (they're doing it with AppSpace) and providing the tools and one other whom I am not at liberty to talk about (though that is, and I will leave it at this, ironic) will be jumping in to my knowledge.

What amazes me is that the signs that it was important have been there for a long time. Guys like Michael Maoz, one of the great analysts in CRM were preaching that social media and communities were going to have an impact in the friggin' 90s - he was a prophet before his time. I was a bit more of a bandwagon jumper or a wave rider, depending on your metaphorical proclivities, but I recognized the power of these media in a customer-driven ecosystem three or four years ago - but CRM technology vendors and consulting firms, while using the media, have been slow to offer them as tools or part of a solution set.

So I began to look elsewhere to see what I could find that approached the level of a suite. I found three and have heard that there is a fourth but haven't found it yet.

Here's what I found so far:

Lotus Connects - Lotus Connects is the one suite that has some of my DNA embedded in a long genetic chain leading to it. I have a long history with Lotus that I can't ignore (sniff. Makes me want to...I WON'T! I WON'T! I'm a MAN!) Not only does it provide the social networking capability and communities for collaboration, but blogging tools wiki tools, and tools for social bookmarking (what they call "dogears") are part and parcel of the suite. The fact that it comes from Lotus is even more astounding, given that Notes has been the only truly historic product from this division of IBM to date - in fact, since IBM bought the independent Lotus back in the late 90s. This product is the charge of Sean Poulley and Jeff Schick, two highly experienced execs with IBM. This one has serious possible long limbs. I haven't seen it in action yet, but I am going to in a few days to weeks depending on IBM and Jeff Schick's schedule and I'll report back what I think it can (and can't) do. I'm kind of excited about this, having built Notes practices back in the 1990s.

Thing is, the power of this can be huge because it has IBM's imprimateur stamped on it. That means scalability and VERY large deployments of this suite are possible. Plus it has the consulting services of the most massive consulting machine on the planet behind it. This is neither good or bad unto itself but it is what it is.

Having been a Notes guy for so long, I have an unwieldy, sloppy affection for Lotus. I hope this thing works for them.

Intel SuiteTwo - SuiteTwo is probably the most fascinating model since this is a best of breed suite that's under the umbrella of Intel but actually consists of an alliance between NewsGator, SimpleFeed, SixApart, Socialtext, VisiblePath and the integrator SpikeSource. Its essentially a Web 2.0 alliance to fill the hole that the CRM vendors haven't dropped the dirt into yet. This one could work since all the apps are best of breed and Intel has a strong brand obviously. But it could fail since there are some overlaps in the suite and its probably cheaper to buy the offerings independently than the suite as whole. That means that a lot of faith is being placed in SpikeSource to do the integration right since that's the only possible reason to pay more - i.e. integration convenience. However, there is no doubt about the power of the partners in the suite with industry leaders like SixApart for hosted blogs, podcasts, etc and incredible tools like Movable Type or Socialtext which dominates the Enterprise wiki market now, Newsgator, the most sophisticated of the RSS aggregators out there, ad infinitum.

Zoho - Technically, this I don't think is a suite but they have an agglomeration of multiple tools that might as well be a suite. As you know, they are a finalist of my Steppin' Out 2007 Vendor Awards (Watch here for the announcement May 3, for the winner) and have been a leading player in the online collaboration suite market for a little while now. They have multiple tools that have a bit of a different bent than the other two above. While Lotus and Intel are focused around the social media generally, Zoho is actually more focused around the social aspects of a productive employee. Their offerings reflect that much more with Zoho CRM, Wiki, Writer (a Word-like application), Chat, Projects, Meeting and Notebook. Their CRM application is a strong SFA focused application that can compete with any one for functionality out of the box. Their Notebook is the most interesting and is a collaborative effort that combines graphics, photos, video, audio and written capabilities in conjunction with RSS feeds in an access-controlled environment - something like Vox from SixApart but potentially richer and more collaboration, less blog.

Technorati : collaboration tools, social media, web 2.0

Comments

[Arvind]

Nice post again, Paul and thanks for making Zoho a part of it! Eagerly waiting for the awards announcement on May 3 :-)