Rob Bois Business Quotations

Some customers have the expectation that you flip a switch and you're done. But there are setup costs and training costs and ramp-up costs. There's getting the system customized to match the business context and then getting people to use the system. CRM implementations are still complex, even if they're delivered in an on-demand fashion.

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.

We knew that the small and midsize business segment would be a large part of this market, but we were a little surprised at how many large enterprises were eager to evaluate the software-as-service option.

The small to midsize business segment is a very large part of the hosted market, ... Software-as-service lets companies get CRM in place quickly without having to raid the I.T. budget to do it.

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.

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.