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.
There is a persistent myth that open source operates like Linux, with a global team of developers holding hands and praying for world code peace. Most open-source projects don't work this way, looking much more like Eric Raymond's "cathedral" rather than the holy grail, the "bazaar," as Juergen of SnapLogic points out in an exceptionally insightful post on open-source software development.
The problem with many open-source projects is that while familiarity may not breed contempt, it can certainly breed institutional incompetence:
Why do so many open-source projects not have the active community of external contributors they are hoping for? Because they have been largely developed by co-located teams of hired software engineers, 100% dedicated to the project, managed and organized like any traditional software development effort. This seems to be especially true for the new crop of 'custom build' open-source companies, which would like to take advantage of the open-source business model. They might hope to also enjoy the advantages of the open-source development model one day, but achieving that requires a conscious effort.... Read more
Juergen Brendell over at SnapLogic writes insightfully about the value of open source versus open APIs (application programming interfaces). (This is a related argument to Savio Rodrigues' insistence on open standards.) Open source is nice and helpful in fostering development communities around a project, Juergen writes, but open APIs go that much further.
But Juergen isn't arguing that you can have one without the other (though if stranded on a deserted island, I think he'd choose open APIs). Rather, he's arguing that developers need open APIs first, with open source a nice complement to them:
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