MindTouch and SnapLogic partner to juice up your CRM application
When I first saw the headline "MindTouch and SnapLogic Announce Deki for CRM to Enhance the Value of Leading CRM Solutions," I didn't think much of it. Despite being an adviser to MindTouch and watching SnapLogic for the past few years, I couldn't get excited. How sexy can it be to "enhance the value" of SugarCRM and Salesforce.com?
Reading through the press release, it became much more interesting. My company uses SugarCRM, and the idea of connecting SugarCRM with our accounts payable system (through SnapLogic) and integrating the ability to take free-form wiki notes in SugarCRM's set page structures made a lot of sense to me.
Suddenly my team would be able to see what our customers were doing after the sale: when they were invoiced and when they paid. We'd be able to take deeper notes on account activity. And we'd be able to see information in our CRM system that we'd never otherwise see or, at least, not in context.
Consider: sales guy calls lead and as he's talking he notices in his Deki-enhanced SugarCRM account page commentary from the lead's executive management in a blog and/or Twitter talking about an issue related to the sales guy's product. He mentions it, develops a rapport and clearly sells his value proposition against that executive commentary, and closes the deal as a result.
This is, in fact, a true story from MindTouch's sales team, and it's the sort of thing I'd love to see within SugarCRM. It makes CRM a flexible, living business tool, something that is more than simply a record of past transactions and instead a glimpse into the future.
Unfortunately for IBM Global Services and other consulting organizations that make a lot of money on complex software, Deki and SnapLogic's CRM solution is easy to deploy. Drag-and-drop easy. Maybe HP should return EDS before all software becomes this useful and easy to set up and administer.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I'm particularly fond of this observation around traditional CRM apps...
"It makes CRM a flexible, living business tool, something that is more than simply a record of past transactions and instead a glimpse into the future."
This is precisely what my company (http://insideview.com/cat-free.html) is doing for SugarCRM customers, along with customers of Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM On Demand, and Landslide Technologies.
We deliver a living, breathing view of the customer within CRM by tapping into both traditional data and news sources as well as social media and social networks. This provides CRM users with a true current awareness of their customers & prospects -- whether it's alerts about relevant business events (e.g. leadership change, new product launch, acquistion, etc.) or company connections that we've found through a user's personal or professional network (e.g. across our contact metabase, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
Also like your point about IBM prof services... our SugarCRM module, like Deki's, is "too easy" to deploy (in IBM and HP's eyes at least). SugarCRM has done a better job with their module loader UI than any other CRM thus far, making deployment as simple as a few mouse clicks. Try it yourself! http://www.sugarexchange.com/product_details.php?product=400