By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is the pinnacle of pop-rock, 1968’s Something
Else by The Kinks – more fun than The Beatles, more rock than Pet Sounds and way more intelligent than
anything else at the time:
“It’s really a Dantesque scene,” said police officer Arioso Obregon.
Another plane goes
down, this one in Peru. First CoffeeSM isn’t a paranoid
conspiracy theorist, except when it comes to the left-wing MSM never giving
President Bush any credit for anything whatsoever – the man could single-handedly
cure cancer and the headlines would be “Cancer Researchers Thrown Out Of Work
By Bush,” “Leukemia Sufferers: Why Is Bush Ignoring Us?” and “Cancer Cure Too
Late For Many” and TV coverage would focus on AIDS activists protesting the
lack of a cure for AIDS and one six-year old Hispanic girl in Albuquerque who
will have died of cancer a week before the cure became available, with the
family crying that “people like us” don’t matter enough to Bush for him to find
that cure a little bit faster – but doesn’t it seem like there’ve been quite a
few plane crashes recently?
Or maybe First CoffeeSM’s just thinking of his
family’s upcoming trip to see Mrs. First CoffeeSM’s family in New
Zealand, which will entail that old
favorite Antalya- Istanbul- Dubai- Singapore- Brisbane- Auckland itinerary, and
back again. We don’t need to be reading about more plane crashes for a while,
okay?
…
The news yesterday
was that CRM is “back,” that the market’s going great guns again.
Half right.
Remember 1979? That year a single named “Rapper’s Delight”
by the Sugarhill Gang hit the charts. When it did, rap/hip-hop accounted for
2.5 percent of the Top 40 chart, despite a 100 percent increase from 1978. The
band Blondie quickly copied it with “Rapture,” scoring one of their bigger
post-New Wave hits.
Most critics at the time said well, it’s an interesting new
sound, this rap, hip-hop, whatever you want to call it, it’ll be popular in the
clubs for a year or two, influence a few mainline acts and peter out, no
staying power. Not really a viable long-term business vehicle for the industry, you know. Flash in the pan.
Today, 25 years later, rap/hip-hop is the dominant pop music
genre. It’s the rappers and hip-hoppers who are signing the huge contracts,
getting radio play, producing the cool ring tones and doing the beer ads on TV. Oh, and you can catch Blondie’s
oldies act on their tour of southern Wales. Good seats still available.
It’s hosted CRM, CRM software you rent
which resides on someone else’s servers, which is where it’s at, growing like
crazy. AMR Research found that while
the overall CRM market grew ten percent, none too shabby, granted, to about $11
billion, sales of hosted customer management applications grew 105 percent in
2004.
Overall, in 2003, CRM’s revenue was 95 percent from
installed applications, and five percent from hosted. In 2004 hosted had almost
doubled that, with the deck tilting to 91 to 9 percent. It might still be
single figures, but that’s quite a shift, folks.
“The report indicates that the hosted model has reached
prime time as a delivery method for Customer Relationship Management
applications… the hosted model has reinvigorated a market that failed to grow
over the past several years,” said Rob Bois, senior research analyst at AMR
Research. “The hosted category has changed the whole perception of customer
management with faster implementations, quicker time to value, and easy
customization.”
Hosted’s two stars these days are RightNow Technologies and
salesforce.com, which saw 97 percent and 83 percent growth rates, respectively.
In terms of overall revenue salesforce.com zoomed up the charts from number 22
to 12 with a bullet, but probably isn’t going to crash through the silicon
ceiling of the installed-base application vendors.
Still, there is the Sugarhill Gang to think about...
SAP’s taking over the #1 place from Siebel is in no small
part due to dollar-euro exchange rates working in favor of the German company,
but still, they are #1 now. AMR expects SAP to find success in the
manufacturing sector and for Siebel’s hosted CRM OnDemand product to be the
company’s hope. Ironic, as viciously as Tom Siebel blasted hosted CRM when
salesforce.com came out, that it might be the company’s lifeline now that they’ve
shown the sense to diversify out of buggy whips and zeppelin repair.
First CoffeeSM thinks Siebel has a good shot at
becoming a serious hosted player. At least they’re in the water swimming with
the Right Now, salesforce.com and NetSuite sharks and learning as they go, unlike
SAP, who has yet to dip a toe in the hosted market. Microsoft can’t
even get their installed version out the door, any success in hosted is a long
way off.
The listing of the vendors ranked by revenue is the usual scorecard,
SAP and Siebel with 15 and 12 percent of the market, PeopleSoft with four
percent, Amdocs, Dendrite, Oracle-with-the-PeopleSoft-asterisk at three percent
and Aspect (about the only significant CRM vendor who’s expected to see a
decline in market share in 2005), Avaya, Cisco-ICSG and The Boys From Redmond splashing
around in the two percent pool.
OnviSource, the parent company of CadCom
Telesystems, Business Solutions and Axius Portals, has announced the purchase of Davacord, Inc. in an all-cash
transaction.
Davacord sells converged contact center recording and
quality monitoring products that give call centers performance and liability
protection, without complex integrations or software upgrades. Davacord’s
products are currently used by more than 700 customers in North America, Europe
and Asia Pacific, including many Fortune 500 customers.
OnviSource is the parent of a group of companies offering
contact centers a suite of integrated system and software applications, hosted
application services, telecom access services and business outsourcing services
in sales, marketing, and business operations.
For whatever it’s worth, earlier this year Davacord was
named the 2005 Member’s Choice Winner for the industry’s best recording and
quality monitoring tools by ContactCenterWorld.com. The award was tabulated by
the highest number of votes from actual users of call recording and quality
monitoring products who rated nominated companies on the quality of their
products, ongoing support and overall satisfaction.
…
IEX Corporation, a Tekelec company and Keynomics
LLC have announced a
partnership where IEX will offer its customers Talk, Type, Listen, a
contact center agent productivity training program designed to enhance agent
computer keyboarding and transcription skills.
The offering is developed by Keynomics and is provided as a
Web-based hosted program accessed via the WebStation Plus module available with
the IEX TotalView Workforce Management system. The training is designed to
deliver permanent improvements in contact center productivity, quality and
ergonomics in terms of how an agent interfaces simultaneously with the caller
and the agent’s computer.
IEX sells workforce management and optimization technology
for contact centers. Keynomics sells productivity and quality software for
improving corporate keyboarding and office ergonomic techniques.
…
Dow
Jones is reporting that “the
call-center business in the Philippines will continue to grow robustly in the
coming years, albeit at a slower pace than that of the past five years,”
citing Bong
Borja, president of PeopleSupport Inc. and a director of the Call
Center Association of the Philippines.
Borja recently told a business forum that the industry is
expected to grow seat capacity by 50 percent to 70 percent this year after
ending 2004 with a total of 45,000 agent seats, equivalent to 72,000 jobs. In
2000 “this sector of the business process outsourcing industry had a capacity
of 2,000 seats and employed 3,000 agents,” Dow Jones reports.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
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content.
