Web Worker Daily, one of my favorite blogs, gave a recommendation to SugarCRM recently. In its article “Web Work 101: 10 Apps You Can’t Do Without — Redux” Web Worker Daily listed SugarCRM as a recommended “Social CRM” product.
Nice to see SugarCRM getting the acknowledgement it deserves, especially in the Social CRM space.
Last week at SugarCon I got to spend some quality time with Aldo Zanoni, CEO, and Teruel Carrasco, Sales Director, at Omni Technology Solutions. It was a timely meeting because Epicom had completed, less than a week earlier, a reseller agreement with Omni. Epicom will be selling and implementing Omni’s products, including its Riva Integration Server that synchronizes information between SugarCRM and Microsoft Exchange or Novell GroupWise.
We really like the Riva product because it solves an all-too-common problem with CRM systems: making legacy email clients like Outlook and GroupWise work seamlessly with CRM systems like SugarCRM. Riva does this by providing two-way synchronization of address book, calendar, and sales data between Exchange, GroupWise and SugarCRM. This allows CRM users to keep the Outlook or GroupWise client they are accustomed to using while taking advantage of the benefits of a centralized CRM system. Users can view, edit, and delete CRM opportunities and support cases directly from the email client. They can also archive emails from Outlook or GroupWise to SugarCRM easily and quickly. Omni has also built some great tools for automatically creating new contacts and accounts directly from emails by parsing emails for contact information.
Aldo Zanoni, Omni’s CEO (that’s him below), was a speaker at SugarCon last week and he shared some of his firm’s development plans for the Riva product. We can’t talk about all of Omni’s plans right now but we are excited to see the firm heading in the direction of increased flexibility in its integration with SugarCRM. Stay tuned for more new developments. We’ll be writing about new product features as they are released in the coming months.
Until then, we are looking forward to deploying the Riva Integration Server at some existing Epicom customers as well as some new accounts.
Do you have questions about Omni or the Riva Integration Server? Give us a call or comment below and we’ll be happy to help you.
Some pictures of the Omni team taken at SugarCon:
Paul Greenberg is one of the CRM industries top thought leaders. Here he speaks at SugarCon 2010 on “Social CRM” — the intersection of Social Media and Customer Relationship Management.
Paul is the author of “CRM at the Speed of Light.”
Paul’s blog can be found here.
Paul Greenberg Speaks on Social CRM at SugarCon 2010 from Bill Harrison on Vimeo.
Last week most of the Epicom team was at SugarCon, the SugarCRM User and Developer Conference in San Francisco. Like most conferences there were lots of great sessions and many opportunities for networking, but three things stood out in my mind as different and special about this SugarCon.
This was my third SugarCon and this conference differed from the others in a couple of important ways.
There were more than twice as many exhibitors at this SugarCon than last year. It is clear that the ecosystem of products that integrate with, complement, and support SugarCRM is growing at a rapid pace. This is good for everyone. It demonstrates that SugarCRM is being taken seriously by enterprise customers and that the market for third-party SugarCRM products is now big enough to support a wide array of companies.
One of the conference tracks at SugarCon focused on social media marketing and the intersection of social media and customer relationship management. This topic — Social CRM — is a big deal in the CRM world and one that we will be writing on quite a bit in the coming weeks and months. Paul Greenberg presented an awesome keynote address outlining why social media is so critical to the customer conversation. His statistics about the use of social media as a means to get product recommendations, complain about bad customer service, and build customer loyalty were amazing. Look for more on this in the coming days.
I feel that SugarCon 2010 was a “coming out party” for a product and a company that have always been good and are now becoming great. I’ll give quite a bit of the credit for this phenomenon to Larry Augustin, SugarCRM’s new CEO. SugarCRM has always had a smart and dedicated staff but they lacked the leadership of a seasoned veteran like Larry. He has brought focus to SugarCRM’s direction and he has also brought some key hires that are driving the marketing of the firm in new directions. As a SugarCRM Gold Partner we see this every day in support we are receiving from the partner channel. I’m happy to see the direction SugarCRM is taking and looking forward to all the growth the entire SugarCRM ecosystem will experience between now and the next SugarCon.
Did you attend SugarCon this year? Please feel free to share your comments and experiences.
In one of the funniest and most entertaining sessions of the conference, Daniel Lyons (aka “Fake Steve Jobs”) speaks at SugarCon 2010.
Fake Steve Jobs at SugarCon 2010 from Bill Harrison on Vimeo.
The Epicom team is on-site at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for SugarCon, the SugarCRM Users and Developers Conference. We’ll be blogging about the event all week, but here are some big announcements from the first morning’s sessions.
Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM kicked things off with the announcement of SugarCRM 6. The new version offers big improvements to the SugarCRM user experience. Sugar 6 looks very “Web 2.0″ and takes much greater advantage of web technologies like AJAX to minimize the steps needed to be complete a task. Epicom has been working with Sugar under a non-disclosure agreement over the last six months to evaluate and offer suggestions for improving version 6. We are excited this new version is now public and ready for official beta release. Larry says version 6 will be generally available sometime this summer, probably in July.
Here are some pictures from the morning keynote sessions.
Larry Augustin kicks things off at the morning keynote
Amazing statistics on the growth of SugarCRM
Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, speaking at SugarCon
I am writing from Tampa today, having just finished three days of meetings in Houston and Tampa with new and prospective customers. And if there is a single theme that can be drawn through these three days it is the tremendous value of SugarCRM as a platform for very diverse and complex CRM applications.
Not content with basic sales pipeline and customer service management, I’m seeing new customers using relatively inexpensive, “mid-market” CRM systems to automate, track, and manage nearly every aspect of their business except accounting. And with real-time integrations to accounting and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, even some accounting functions are falling on the shoulders of the CRM system.
What’s most interesting is that these complex projects can now be completed far more quickly and for a fraction of the cost of similar projects attempted only a few years ago.
The two companies I met with over the last two days are perfect illustrations of this.
The first, a large manufacturer of industrial equipment with about $650 million in annual revenue, is using SugarCRM to push critical customer information to its far flung salesforce. They’ll also use Sugar for traditional sales opportunity management functions like keeping up with their sales pipeline, but the real value of the system will be a tight integration with their ERP system, which is closed and difficult to use. By linking it to SugarCRM, sales reps will be able to view and act on customer order histories, order status information, inventory levels, and customer payment data. Systems with this level of sophistication have typically been implemented using only “enterprise-grade” CRM systems such as Siebel or SAP. But modern “mid-market” CRM systems — particularly open source solutions like SugarCRM — make these projects achievable at a fraction of the cost of the traditional enterprise deployment. Plus these new systems are web-based, easier to use, cheaper to support, and accessible from just about anywhere.
My second visit was to a speciality electronics distributor in Tampa that is looking to use SugarCRM as a platform for delivering complex customer data to its inside and outside sales reps. Traditionally an application like this would have been built from scratch or a set of custom analytic dashboards would have been built using an expensive business intelligence tool. But with SugarCRM our prospect will be able to take advantage of robust customer and activity management capabilities built into Sugar out of the box, and then layer a sophisticated customer dashboad system on top of this base. The result represents the best of both worlds. The customer will get the custom application they need without having to build everything from scratch. Development costs are minimized, support costs will be far lower, and our prospect will have a sophisticated application up and running in only a few months.
All of this is possible because SugarCRM is effectively a “CRM Toolkit” that can be molded and shaped to the needs of each customer. Sugar may not be perfect for every customers but we are having a hard time finding situations where it does not offer the best combination of high flexibility and low cost for complex CRM deployments.
Epicom is rolling-out a series of instructional videos for SugarCRM. Here is our first installment which shows end-users how to configuration navigation tabs in SugarCRM.
On Thursday and Friday of last week I was reminded of the importance of ongoing training to reinforce the value of a CRM deployment.
I was in Denver for two day of SugarCRM training with our client ViaWest. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. ViaWest has been using SugarCRM for about three years and their system is a fully integrated part of their sales and operations departments. What more could I add that had not already been figured out internally? But ViaWest’s new Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Bill Hobstetter (pictured below) realized that the use of the CRM system is critical to his success and the success of the company. And as he talked to employees around the company, he found that there was still lots of inconsistency in the use of the tool.
So I spent two days in front of the sales groups at headquarters in Denver while the remote ViaWest sites were linked in via video conference. The sessions were tremendously productive. We went through all of the major processes that sales and sales support staff manage using the CRM. I took questions throughout and clarified many of the inconsistencies. It turned out that most folks new how to use the system, but they lacked knowledge of the overall processes being completed, so their methods of getting things done were all over the board.
Here are my takeaways from the training sessions:
A big thanks to the ViaWest team for hosting me on Thursday and Friday.
Do you have thoughts and ideas on how to make CRM training more effective? Please share them below.
Bill Hobstetter, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at ViaWest
We are excited to have Raymon Howington (pictured below) joining our team as our new SugarCRM channel manager. Epicom has always had a strong relationship with SugarCRM and having a channel manager with Raymon’s solid knowledge of the industry, great work ethic, and a desire to excel makes this relationship even better. Raymon is based in Dallas and on Tuesday and Wednesday he came down to Austin to meet the Epicom team in person, and talk strategy and plans for 2010 over pizza and beer.
As evidenced in his LinkedIn profile, Raymon brings tremendous business experience and industry knowledge to SugarCRM. We are really looking forward to working with him.
Welcome Raymon!
