Rob Bois Quotations

It isn't a scalability issue. Typically when you're talking about an organization that will have more than a thousand CRM users, you're talking about a broad implementation that will touch more areas of the company and will involve more business processes.

Onyx says they have a poison pill in place, though I haven't seen it yet. It seems like an extreme method, but it could happen.

The use of Microsoft's .NET also has Web-services implications within an organization because it provides an effective way to integrate Microsoft applications together.

The vendors are selling fewer full suite deals, multimillion dollar soup-to-nuts implementations, and we see that reflected in how they are trying to build services-oriented architectures, so they can deploy modules rather than big-bang implementations. This allows customers to piece together the business functions they need -- even modules from different vendors -- to meet the specific demands of automatic processing rather than having to buy an entire suite at the outset.

They've been hinting at this for nine months. Given that amount of time, you might have expected a broader offering. This is not even full-blown SFA. It's really just contact management.

The hosted model has reinvigorated a market that has failed to grow over the past several years. The hosted category has changed the whole perception of customer management with faster implementations, quicker time to value and easy customization.

Salesforce.com is selling an on-demand model that gives customers the ability to roll out a CRM deployment quickly and easily and then scale that deployment either up or down to meet their business needs. So far, small and midsize businesses have taken the best advantage of that, but we are starting to see larger companies that are seriously evaluating an on-demand model.

Salesforce.com is an ambassador for this space because it reached critical mass first. So when Salesforce.com has a problem, people start questioning the whole delivery model.

Because most of these are monthly investments and in the past were smaller deployments, we haven't heard about the big disasters yet. The larger implementations will be the ones to watch.

They are going after existing SAP customers. We've talked to customers and while it is a nice checkbox option to have, it's not the primary criteria they use when selecting an on-demand solution.