Why hasn't anyone...
If I was a crafty shoot from the hip consultant who was looking to raise awareness of my own little personal consulting company here's what I'd do...
I'd go register the domain name crmuptime.com or something equally witty and creative.
I'd buy one user license (or find a free license if they offer one that is on their "production" server) of every on demand vendor out there. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Oracle, RightNow, Salesnet, Entellium, SugarCRM, and any other CRM vendor who has an on demand offering.
Then you get/write some simple software that just goes checks uptime, response time, etc basically doing everything I suggested trust.salesforce.com should do in a previous post. I'd then post all of those stats in a snazzy grid on the home page of the website I just created.
So it'll be like trust.salesforce.com, but this time you're doing it for every vendor, essentially forcing them to reveal how good/bad they really are.
I'd personally love that. Let's get some third party evaluation going on. It's such an itsy tiny investment and you could instantly be one of the most popular CRM review websites out there. Hell, maybe even a online news magazine or something could do this...
I'm not saying salesforce.com would necessarily come out on top (but my brainwashing compels me to think we will)... but I'd bet just about everyone who cares about CRM would visit the website on a regular basis.
Of course, ideally there would be some sort of auditing of the data because you know the worst vendor would say "oh, they're skewing the data to make their preferred CRM vendor look better" etc etc....
Once I've got that built I'd then do my own personal reviews of each of the vendors. Have forums where people can gab about their experiences and stories as to why they switched from one vendor to another.
It could be a pretty darn popular site...
Anyway, that's my thought for today.
I'd go register the domain name crmuptime.com or something equally witty and creative.
I'd buy one user license (or find a free license if they offer one that is on their "production" server) of every on demand vendor out there. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Oracle, RightNow, Salesnet, Entellium, SugarCRM, and any other CRM vendor who has an on demand offering.
Then you get/write some simple software that just goes checks uptime, response time, etc basically doing everything I suggested trust.salesforce.com should do in a previous post. I'd then post all of those stats in a snazzy grid on the home page of the website I just created.
So it'll be like trust.salesforce.com, but this time you're doing it for every vendor, essentially forcing them to reveal how good/bad they really are.
I'd personally love that. Let's get some third party evaluation going on. It's such an itsy tiny investment and you could instantly be one of the most popular CRM review websites out there. Hell, maybe even a online news magazine or something could do this...
I'm not saying salesforce.com would necessarily come out on top (but my brainwashing compels me to think we will)... but I'd bet just about everyone who cares about CRM would visit the website on a regular basis.
Of course, ideally there would be some sort of auditing of the data because you know the worst vendor would say "oh, they're skewing the data to make their preferred CRM vendor look better" etc etc....
Once I've got that built I'd then do my own personal reviews of each of the vendors. Have forums where people can gab about their experiences and stories as to why they switched from one vendor to another.
It could be a pretty darn popular site...
Anyway, that's my thought for today.
posted by omega at 4:10 PM
4 Comments:
Now you're showing your Salesforce/CRM teeth - fun reading. But it only carries for SaaS CRM, right?
Well, not necessarily - though my little mind has a hard time breaking out of its CRM programming. When I read your comment the first thing that came to mind would actually being some "points of comparison" up there as well.
We hear this all the time. "Google can keep gmail up 100% of the time - why can't you keep your service up 100% too?". As an avid gmail user, I know that it goes down too (a fair bit recently, in fact) - so it might be fun to have a "Gmail stats" row and other SaaS vendors...
In fact, why not do it for all SaaS vendors period?
Let's compare online word processing programs.
Online email options.
In fact, everything on http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/my-office-20-setup could be evaluated in the same way...
Why not? In a SaaS world, someone out there could make a fortune being the service that compares all services.
Just do me a favor, whoever picks up this ball and runs with it, keep it a free service. Sell advertising, sell services, sell anything - but don't make me have to pay to see the stats. No one (except for the vendors and analysts) are going to look at it more than a few times while they're evaluating which vendor to use... keep the core info free!
Wow - I like where you went with that, even though I actually meant something different. I would certainly be a visitor to "http://www.SaaS-uptime.com" or something similar. :-) Where I was going is that you couldn't do a comparison against non-hosted CRM very easily - i.e. MSCRM, etc...
I did compeletely misread your comment. :-)
True...
We're only really talking about MSFT though. SAP has one, ORCL has one... and the other on premise CRM solutions are on the way out the door.
MSFT claims they'll have one at some point in the future - so we can add them to the list when they do this. In the mean time, maybe there's an option on the website that lets you add you "Monitor your own server" for comparisons...
So, sort of similar to how DSLreports.com tells you all the response rates for your zip code, maybe they can do something like that.
So you can compare your own deployment of your on premise CRM server to on demand CRM vendors. And people evaluating could see the averages of all of those on premise stats... Again, that makes it easy, as an on premise vendor, to skew the results in their favor...but I feel like there's a solution out there somewhere.
That'd be a phase 2 though ;-) Get me the grid with on demand CRM vendors and I'd be happy as a clam.
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