In CRMs of yore which offered little choice to customers wont survive the game says Nishant Singh, CEO of the indigenous CRM firm, CRMnext. Singh believes that customers now a day are more interested in offerings which provide a platform experience as opposed to a simple CRM software package with all the usual bells and whistles. Excerpts of an interview:
How have things been in the last 6-8 months from a business standpoint? Which are some of the verticals most interested in CRM (whether on-premise or cloud) at the moment?
Things have been great in last two quarters. We have added some large customers to our portfolio including some big names in pharma, insurance, financial services, and auto finance sectors.
From an outlook perspective, the BFSI vertical looksthe most promising right now. Pharma companies are also interested in applications which can help them manage the changing regulations in marketing especially managing key opinion leaders and physicians. With SMEs cloud CRM sells more as there is not much upfront capital expenditure on IT infrastructure and administration is required.Larger organizations with a sizeable IT team and budgets however are looking at private cloud models. This gives them flexibility to scale overnight and economies of scale work better when the number of users is larger.
Tell us about some of the recent developments at CRMnext.
We recently inaugurated our new state-of-the-art research center in Delhi, one of the largest in the country for a software product company. We also released new patent pending technology innovations which address the core problem with traditional CRM products viz. huge upgrade costs and long migration projects, brittle integration touch-points that are not reliable and are unable to handle complex requirements, flexibility to make fast incremental changes in case of enterprise implementation - typically on-premise or private cloud. We have addressed these problems with:
-- Autobot Upgrade- This capability automatically retrofits existing customization without breaking integrations, with new upgrades.This helps to reduce the cost associated with high migration projects while applying upgrades to the production systems. Thus your CRM application is always current and relevant with changing business dynamics.
-- Autonoma Integration- This is a pattern based integration capability which helps to deliver complex integrations with high reliability and almost zero coding needed on the product side.
-- Shape Shifting Architecture - This architecture provides capability to deliver very high codeless customization.It is possible to configure complex cross departmental processes, escalations, alerts, multiple data entry layouts and much more on the fly.
In addition to this, we also launched our advance sonic report distribution engine, variable search technology and data leak protection functionality.
Any interesting developments/trends you are seeing in terms ofcustomer traits or demands with regard to CRM features or capabilities?
As customer attitudes mature, were seeing them move beyond mere feature comparisons to platform capability which is fast becoming the key to a great ownership experience. Evaluators are looking at total cost ofownership (TCO) over 3-5 years, ease of change and upgrades, integration capability and scalability.
Do you have a global footprint at present? Tell us about your strategy there.
We have customers in Europe and Africa. We are aggressively looking at the MENA and Asia-pacific region and finding great traction. We have partnered with large SIs and local services companies to expand our reach.
As a CRM vendor (especially one of Indian origin) is it difficult foryou to create your own space and an identity in an increasingly crowded space? How do you differentiate yourself in such a marketplace?
We provide a unique proposition to our customers with a "Practice led"implementation methodology and focus on "High impact CRM". Our customers look at CRMnext as an organization-wide strategy execution platform rather than a single problem or a departmental solution. With our innovations like Autobot upgrades, Autonoma integration and Shape-shifting architecture at the core platform, customers have the confidence of executing mission critical processes on CRMnext. We offer a perpetual CRM platform to the customers which can match their dynamic business needs very easily and at a pace which is relevant to their business demands.
What is your view on traditional CRM vendors turning to the Cloudmodel? Is it an easy transformation to pull-off?
Since traditional CRMs were written to mainly be deployed on-premise, they have been struggling with multiple offerings for cloud and on-premise deployment. Most of them have been buying single problem solutions and bundling them to provide a cloud offering. These cloud applications generally lack the depth in feature offered by the traditional on-premise offerings. While at the same time, the on-premise offerings lack the flexibility and ease of change of the new cloud offerings. CRMnext was always built with the belief that in time CRM software will become pervasive and enterprises will need to have the choice to run them anywhere, be it in public cloud, private cloud or on-premise. Hence, CRMnext is a true enterprise class product with a single code base for any deployment which has depth as well as flexibility providing customers the freedom of choice to own it their way and switch as per business needs and economics of scale.
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