By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is The Best of the Byrds:
Yesterday we looked at the
new Forrester report, “Trends 2006: Customer Relationship Management” authored
by William
Band, specifically the three drivers Band found for CRM in 2006.
The report also predicts that CRM license revenue will stay
fairly static at $3 billion for the next three years, whereas will increase
from the $8 billion at the end of 2005 to just under $10 billion by 2008.
Today we’ll look at what Forrester finds are the ten CRM trends to watch in 2006,
but first, the welcome news that Akimbo has announced that Fawlty Towers, the vintage BBC comedy
series whose appeal remains undiminished to audiences worldwide, will be added to the Akimbo Service through
a deal brokered by Beth Clearfield, vice president of programming at BBC
Worldwide Americas.
Besides being a textbook example of CRM negative practice, Fawlty Towers joins other popular BBC
comedies available on Akimbo such as 2
Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Porridge, neither of which this reviewer knows anything about,
sorry.
Akimbo’s Internet-to-TV video-on-demand is a service giving
subscribers access to more than 8,000 titles, including full-length movies, TV
shows, foreign language content, children’s videos, travelogues, how-to
programs, experimental and short films, video blogs and more. Now you can get Fawlty Towers on-demand, at the click of
a button, and this, friends, is why we fought World War II. Ssshhh, don’t mention the war...
One reason for the show’s popularity is that they only did
twelve episodes, six in 1975 and six in 1979, star John Cleese explaining that he
didn’t want it to get stale. This is a horror of his, he broke up Monty Python
when he felt they were starting to repeat themselves in sketches.
The series won three BAFTAs and, perhaps uniquely in the
history of television, has never received a bad press review. When the DVD was
released in 2001, over 30 years since the first transmission, it sold a
staggering 37,000 copies in its first month and scooped Best Comedy on DVD at
the Quality Street Awards.
Fawlty Towers is an English resort hotel Basil Fawlty
(Cleese) and his wife Sybil hilariously mismanage. One thing to note is that it’s
co-written by Cleese’s wife at the time, who played Polly the maid on the show,
ah… shoot, her name escapes me at the moment.
And this is the nagging thing about Cleese: Sure he’s funny,
but he only writes well in partnership. Everything he’s known for, his really
top shelf work, which is the Monty Python stuff and Fawlty Towers, was co-written. I can’t think of anything he’s
written on his own that’s above average.
Akimbo’s service complements existing broadcast, cable and
satellite systems, featuring on-demand video and movies from over 185
providers. Programs include well-known film and television fare as well as
hard-to-find specialty video in areas like extreme sports, education, music,
healthy sustainable living, independent films and foreign languages.
Connie Booth, that’s it. Prunella Scales was Sybil Fawlty,
Booth was Polly the maid, Andrew Sachs was Manuel. That Irish chef never really
caught on, I forget his name.
Oh,
Forrester, right. Ten trends to watch in CRM. Band breaks ten trends down into
three general groups: Five trends emanating from the fact that he finds enterprises
are digesting their CRM technology investments and striving to get more worth
out of these expenditures, three evident as CRM software technology firms
continue to adapt to the demands of their customers and two resulting from the
role professional services providers will play in helping enterprise get more
value from CRM.
Of the most important trends the report
presents, remediation of existing CRM implementations will continue,
Band found after Forrester spoke with 22 large organizations in North
America, Europe, and Asia to understand their methods for achieving business
performance improvement from investment in CRM initiatives.
But a
survey of 94 business and IT executives about their satisfaction with CRM
applications only that only 29 percent were satisfied with how easy it is for
CRM applications to integrate with existing data applications and sources, only
34 percent were
happy with how easy it is to work with CRM software vendors after they have
purchased applications and services and less than 50 percent felt that the business
benefits achieved met their expectations, or stated that they were able to
quickly realize value
from the applications. Not good stats, folks.
In the second group of trends Band also finds
that CRM will become part of business process platforms. “The
rapid consolidation of the enterprise applications vendors during the last few
years,” he writes, “has made it possible for companies to go to a single vendor
to buy cross-enterprise enabling functionality based on a single source of data.”
Examples
given include Amdoc’s purchase of Clarify, thereby closing the gap between
billing and CRM, and Oracle’s multiple acquisitions of CRM such as PeopleSoft
and Siebel. SAP and Microsoft are jumping on the trend as well.
And
as far as consultants go, don’t worry, guys, you’ll stay in business, but if
you want more referrals you need to do a better job, as Band finds that enterprises
will be more demanding of their services partners. Buyer spending on
IT consulting and systems integration services will continue to be significant
in 2006, he concludes, “growing about 5 percent per year in line with the
overall all expansion of IT expenditures.
North
American spending on IT consulting (IT strategy, business process consulting,
and change management) will reach $26.7 billion in the coming year, and expenditures
on systems
integration (packaged applications implementation, custom applications
development, and applications integration) will reach $89.6 billion, but
Forrester research also shows that four out of ten business and IT executives
from 50 large organizations “would not recommend their CRM professional
services provider to other companies.”
So if you get a consultant referred to you by someone else, it’s an almost even bet that it’s because they don’t like you.
Much
more good stuff in the report, of course.
…
Some good news for beleaguered GlobeTel Communications Corp.,
which announced yesterday that its Sanswire Networks LLC subsidiary has successfully floated the Sanswire II
Technology Demonstrator Airship in Palmdale, California.
No word yet on their megamillions Russian deal, which was
supposed to be consummated today – it’s 10:30 in the morning as I write this in
Istanbul, after lunch in Moscow – after being delayed from the end of January,
we’ll keep checking the news wires for that one.
GlobeTel was supposed to get $150 million of the $600
million for that deal from their Russian partners at the end of January, but
when that didn’t happen they said they’d get $300 million by about today.
The Sanswire float test followed what GlobeTel officials
called “our streamlined test procedure in order to validate the envelope
integrity with the Sanswire proprietary lifting system and carbon composite
structure.” So they were making sure the materials the demonstration blimp’s
made out of actually works, and mission accomplished.
Timothy Huff, CEO of GlobeTel said in a prepared statement
that “the success of the test gives us a lead in the high altitude airship
market… I look forward to the continued acceleration of our test program, and
to launching our first commercial vehicle in the coming future.”
Stay tuned.
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