By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is solid ol’ classic rock, Stephen Stills’ 1972 Manassas, released in the last year of the Great Era for rock’n’roll, and which can stand in the same company as the year’s other redwoods, such as Exile On Main Street, St. Dominic’s Preview, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Eat A Peach:
Salesboom.com, the provider of on demand customer relationship management software who aspires to play in the salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow league for SMB hosted CRM, has announced an enhanced administrative upgrade feature for Salesboom users.
Dubbed the Salesboom “SmartUpgrade,” the new feature will allow Salesboom administrators to select which updates they wish to use and when to introduce them to their users.
Salesboom has been releasing new updates to their hosted CRM, with an update at least every 4 weeks. The new “SmartUpgrade” feature will allow system administrators more control and flexibility over which updates they would like to see launched. The new “SmartUpgrade” system will be available to all Salesboom users with the upcoming release of Salesboom v7.0.
The Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Salesboom.com touts their frequent updates as their competitive advantage of the trio of established players in the space: “Yet even with the versatility of the Software-as-a-Service model, the biggest online CRM providers [see above] continue to hold that functionality over their customers’ heads,” company officials say, adding, with the not-completely-accurate insinuation that others don’t release patches and feature updates ahead of scheduled version updates, that “with Salesboom’s SaaS model, customers don’t have to worry about waiting months for promised features and patches, as they are released in a system of scheduled and transparent updates, occurring at least every 4 weeks.”
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Fargo, North Dakota-based Vtrenz, Inc. has announced product enhancements for its marketing automation platform. Vtrenz iMarketing Automation is engineered to give marketers tools to plan, build, manage, execute and measure both online and offline marketing activities, designed to help companies “generate, qualify and nurture leads as well as retain and win-back customers,” according to company officials.
Adding behavior-based segmentation capabilities, a new integrated campaign management tool, and multi-track rules-based campaign automation, iMarketing Automation has improved its offerings for running automate marketing campaigns triggered at the time most appropriate for the contact instead of the time most convenient for the sender.
It’s billed as “built for non-IT users; marketers, sales representatives, or other business professionals.”
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When SAP’s VP of CRM application solution management, Siegfried Leiner, said in an interview last week with ComputerWire that hosted CRM is “commodity CRM,” dissing it in favor of componentized, platform-based CRM where CRM functionality is integral to the application infrastructure, it was up to someone from the hosted community to swing back.
Kudos to founder and CEO of hosted CRM supplier RightNow Technologies Inc, Greg Gianforte, for picking up the gauntlet, pointing out that SAPs approach is just an attempt to save an outmoded way of operating, according to ComputerWire.
“Chopping its application up into bite-sized pieces is not going to save SAPs bacon because they still insist that all elements have to be used with its costly and impractical NetWeaver platform, negating the flexibility of choosing which applications to run,” he said.