DaaS is the New Salesforce

Last weeks SugarCon10, Twitter Chirp, "DaaS is the new SaaS" and today's Salesforce Jigsaw acquistion.  Thoughts on today's Salesforce $142M Jigsaw acquistion from a wider perspective, and other insights on increasingly cloudy business and technology intersections.

I attended SugarCon 2010 last week, with the helpful support of Focus.  I won’t cover overall conference recaps as they are captured here, here, and here.  Overall, the attention and time investment SugarCRM gave to to the latest trends in Social CRM was great.  I will save feedback on that piece as the Salesforce.com $142M Jigsaw acquisition today trumped the news.

Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler presented last Wednesday on “DaaS is the new SaaS“.  The indirect, horizontally integrated sales model has been the norm in the technology industry, but analogs can be applied to many other sectors, such as the dealership model in insurance or automobiles, franchise in retail, or social service delivery in the public sector.

In all these sectors, a key historical issue has been on how best to integrate, segment, and collaborate sales and customer data with business partners and regain control of the end to end customer experience.  Its a very complex business issue on its own and has not had an adequate technical approach until recently.  The emergence of B2B Platforms, with an assumption of some level of core data model standardization via a Cloud option, has potential to address many of the prior issues.  Extremely complex and costly middleware rule customizations, or worse, point to point solutions, were the options pursued earlier with the end result of, usually, zero adoption.

For an example of how that went in the auto sector a decade ago, feel free to lookup the story of Commerce One.

As a second pillar, the growth Social Networking can address much of the unstructured data at the customer conversation end point, empowering not just Marketing with new tools, but Service and Sales as well.  The real pressure is on integrating across all front office functions, not just Marketing.  There is a danger in viewing the trend in Social CRM as a Marketing only led, or “Twitter” led initiative, leaving the cross-unit strategy and planning phase behind.   This phase is now more important than ever, with any missteps being highly visible (look up the Walmart “fake blogger” story).  If left to a single front office function or group, the results will likely be zero ROI or worse, loss of customer trust.  There are signs this is already happening.

That perspective was resonated loudly in the conversations last week at SugarCon.  More on that later.

It was interesting that the SugarCRM conference was followed with Chirp, the Twitter developer conference in SF.  Its very clear that Salesforce is investing heavily in both trends, with Chatter covering the social side, and Jigsaw as one piece of the B2B platform play.   But this story is just starting, and is not about a single CRM vendor.

Customer front office strategic planning now is more critical than ever.  Ironically, as technology cost curves are going down, the complexity of decision making is going up.  

Cloud platforms (Social, B2B), along with data virtualization and unified communications vendor offerings, are among the many options now that need to be examined, albeit at at dramatically lower price points.  

Yet these are all still low in the maturity/adoption phase overall, especially in industry verticals and large enterprises (note: I do not count "bolting a CRM tool" as real adoption and transformation).  The recent pushes have leveled the playing field for SMEs, but comes with many other major caveats "under the hood", that are not highlighted in the vendor brochure ware and sales pitches.  This becomes even more critical for large enterprises competing in global markets.

If you consider your company as a leader (or aspirational leader) in customer centricity and one of your key competitive differentiators, source of brand and customer loyalty, you need to think strategy, approach, and plan first, organizational change and culture next, and technology last.  

And think about this, when your competitors have access to the same basic platform, aren't your CRM differentiators then lost?  It's an evolution, not a revolution.  

Darwin and Schumpeter at work.