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.
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