Salesboom Hits Salesforce.com Where it Hurts

The CRM wars are beginning again! Today, Salesboom.com a leading provider of software-as-a-service CRM launched an enticement program that rewards customers deserting Salesforce.com CRM for Salesboom CRM software solutions with a $5000 signup bonus and free data migration services.

Historically, Salesforce.com bullied its rival Salesboom.com on numerous occasions starting with a battle over the proprietary Salesboom brand name in 2003. Salesboom.com in turn has accused Salesforce.com employees of maliciously accessing the Salesboom proprietary technology, sales and marketing materials.

It is nice to know that there are other alternatives for Salesforce.com and in the case of Salesboom.com a better solution for considerably less money.

Salesboom also provided a marketing document titled Top 9 reasons Why You Should Switch from Salesforce to Salesboom which hits Salesforce.com customers right between their eyes! One interesting reason being Salesboom.com the first to offer real time support via online chat right from within the application instead of calling and waiting for untimely responses from Salesforce.com

You can find the release here, in which the President of Salesboom.com, Rami Hamodah had something very interesting and bold to say:

“The relationship between Salesboom.com and Salesforce.com is a one way street. Salesforce.com customers embark on their journey along this one way street and find themselves at our door. This one way street analogy sums up our relationship with Salesforce.com, we should be thankful to them, after all they are our largest source of new clients!”

Two weeks ago rumors had it that Salesforce.com has shopped itself to the big daddy of all business software , Oracle, and representatives from both companies refused to comment which leads me to believe this could actually happen. If Oracle acquires Salesforce.com, the Salesboom.com people will be happy-go-lucky and here is why:

Salesforce.com success is mainly based on smaller businesses; evident by their average licenses per customer which is setting at 21 currently. This means that most Salesforce.com customers have 20 sales staff or less and this is small business.

Oracle is used to selling it’s enterprise solutions to large enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses each and to even think that they will be happy to service Salesforce.com customers is frankly absurd! These customers if they have to deal with Oracle they will be in for shock for the pricing and above all the treatment.

There is already a trend of customers leaving Salesforce.com which has an attrition rate of less than 60% which means 40% of their 40,000 customers leave them every year and switch to other providers, such as Salesboom.com. That’s over 16,000 unhappy defunct Salesforce.com customers every year!

What is really funny about the Salesboom CRM Enticement Program is that it takes a page from the Salesforce.com marketing book by touting the No Salesforce.com Logo!

Let’s watch and see the outcome of this battle.

Salesforce.com Customer Data was Stolen Today

Today the State of New Hampshire received a notification from Salesforce.com David Schellhase explaining that some unencrypted external storage devices that have Salesforce.com customer personal information such as the names addresses and social security numbers were stolen from an employee’s vehicle in N.H!

Here is the proof that Salesforce.com customer data was stolen

The Question is, why would Salesforce.com not practice what it breaches to customers? Why aren’t they using Salesforce.com wireless edition instead of saving customer information on laptops? I wonder what Contact Management tool they used to save the data on the laptop? ACT! Maybe? That is so funny!

What a company?! While Marc Benioff is expecting to value his company at P/E of 1000 pretty soon, his company is screwing with customers!! Last November 2007 their employees were scammed and leaked sensitive customer data with credit card information by falling for an email fishing attack.  And Now This.

And yesterday they were suffering from an outage for over 6 hours. I think that Salesforce.com is in great trouble and the customers are noticing and starting to switch to other vendors such as Salesboom.com and RightNow.

Finally Salesforce.com is Up For Sale

I have speculated long ago that Oracle (NasdaqNM:ORCL) will end up gobbling Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) just like they did with JDEdwards, PeopleSoft, Sibel and many others because it is part’s of Oracles strategy: growth-by-acquisition.

Yesterday Tom Foremski from siliconvalleywatcher.com claimed that a reliable insider at salesforce.com revealed to him that the company has shopped itself to Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) for $75 a share for a total of almost 9 Billions, which represents an over 50% premium over the price of the stock before reacting to the news and gaining 8% yesterday. Oracle stock increased by 2% on the news.

I am not sure what to make of this news, but it is worth mentioning that Oracle refused to comment which makes the story likely. Even if this was just a rumor, Oracle’s Larry who is used to bashing Salesforce.com has not said a word this time which to me suggests he is actually interested in such a deal.

If this news story is legitimate then Salesforce.com customers are in big trouble! We all know that Oracle is not SME friendly at all, and Larry himself couple months ago said that no one have figured a way to make money in the SME market yet! Salesforce.com customers will end up dealing with Oracle which has a businesses plan that expects customers to pay an arm and a leg for their expensive products.

The bright side of the story is that these customers have choices and in some cases better choices for better pricing terms. Take for example Salesboom.com which offers a similar hosted CRM service for 40% less pricy on average and has been in business since 2001 and already serves over 6000 customers worldwide.

Other vendors including Salesboom.com also offer a free migration process that helps customers of Salesforce.com jump ship easily by exporting their entire data from SFDC quickly, especially when Salesforce.com does not actually offer easy-export tools to export all their data at once, hence Salesboom CRM Migration Magic Button.

We have to wait and see the outcome of this news, and we shall talk again!

We all remember when Salesforce.com CRM software was a victim to a phishing scam in November 2007, where one of their employees gave out his password, and many Salesforce.com customer information was jeopardized.

Salesforce.com did nothing about it and was short lipped. Today, a direct competitor of them, namely Salesboom.com has released a new security service that will stop any CRM phishing attack before it even happens.

Salesboom.com is now offering two-factor authentication by offering their customers USB tokens to be used when logging in to the Salesboom.com service. I personally think this is a brilliant idea and should be a money-making product for them. What is strange though is why it took so long for an on-demand CRM vendor to act on such an important issue?

Read here about CRM database security

First Artificial Life Created!

It is reported that artificial life form is being created within weeks. Craig Venter, an American Scientist have created a synthetic chromosome by using chemicals in his laboratory!!!!

What is a chromosome?

In genes and DNA in the nucleus of a cell, a chromosome is one of the threadlike stuff that makes them. This is the first time a genetics researcher was able to create such chromosomes in the lab.

Controversially, this means Craig Venter was the first person on earth to create life in the lab. Sort of a God if you ask me!!

Craig suggests that the artificial man-made chromosomes can be transplanted into a living bacterial cell, and then it will take control over that cell, just like that! Effectively what Craig is doing, is creating new life forms by taking over existing life forms and completely changing it to something we have never seen before!

Now, you will hear all kinds of religious people attempting to ban such research, for the love of God in them. I wonder if humans thought for a minute about all these diseases that can be cured including aids, would they accept what Craig Venter is up to?

Read More Here

The God of the software industry, Larry Ellison has just made a bizarre statement:

"So while we think it’s an interesting market — the small market — because it’s large, we just haven’t figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market. We think it’s hard to make money. Our strategy: add more value, go upstream, sell industry-specific software to our existing customers, and we’ll watch and see how SAP does going after small companies. Especially with in Software as a Service which we think is very interesting, but so far no one has figured out how to make any money at it."

Now, Larry must know, right? Wrong! Larry in my opinion is just preparing the stage for a hostile takeover of Salesforce.com.

Larry owns Netsuite which is generating 100million per year and growing by almost 70% year over year. Many other vendors such as RightNow and Salesboom.com are winning customers and generating new revenues daily, and the funny part is they are making more money at it than Oracle!

Larry Ellison knows that software-as-a-service is the next money making model he must embrace, and putting it down maybe is his way of reducing the value of Salesforce.com?

Today, I searched for Salesboom.com on Yahoo, and I found so many results that I have never seen before on google. I messaged my business colleague, and I told him Yahoo today is better than Google!

Ironically, he mentioned that in fact they have just released what they consider the best update to the search index in 3 years, and I believe them.

Here is the result that google was unable to locate for me:

Employer Relationship Management

We all know how it works in this Internet era, If yahoo or whomever gives me better results, I will kiss Google goodbye. There is no such thing as loyalists when it comes to search engines. If you don't believe me, then how do you expect that the top 10 search engines in 1998, are not on that list anymore?

Fearless Yachts has been all the rage lately and for a good reason. These super-looking modern-style yachts are designed by Porsche Design Studios for ultimate speed and performance.

Yes, Porsche designed them in collaboration with Fearless Yachts in Miami Beach,Florida. The company has 5 different models based on the length of the boat. 28,44,68,125 and 150 feet! The only model available yet is the 28 foot yacht, and the others are promised to be coming soon sometime in 2008.

The design combines marine enthusiasm and automotive style, performance and disciplines in one expensive package, although pricing is speculative so far.

My next boat will have to be a Fearless Yacht for sure!

You can see these models at the Fearless Yachts web site.

Yes! If tens of millions of marketing, sales and support employees at millions of small and medium size businesses world wide, where to use a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business solution such as Salesboom.com, instead of traditional install-base solutions global warming would be less of a problem.

Let me explain the theory. A typical company that needs to implement a CRM system for a team of 20 sales and marketing employees, will need to purchase a server(s), firewalls, routers, and other peripherals before the software arrives in a package that includes tens of CDs and hundreds of pages of printed manuals, order forms, etc via the mail. Do you think producing such stuff increases global warming?

One might argue that the software and manuals can be downloaded online, most vendors must do this to justify the tens of thousands of dollars paid by customers for the software. Also most companies prefer to have on-site copies of the software and manuals.

Once the system is in place, an IT staff must maintain and support the system, and when upgrades become available or bug fixes are released, such software is also usually shipped via the mail and also comes with tens of CDs and printed manuals.

On average the hardware investment becomes obsolete in 3-4 years which will force the company to purchase new servers, routers, etc. Many companies have multiple locations, and multiple purchases are indeed required. The hardware infrastructure hosting these business solutions requires electricity to maintain uptime!

Had these companies used software-as-a-service, only a fraction of the hardware infrastructure and the power to run it would be required, since it's a service and the software is centrally hosted at the vendor. Tens of millions of CDs, packaging materials, shipping boxes, software manuals, shipping/receiving paper slips, etc would be virtually eliminated.

Tens of millions of companies are doing this everyday, which increases global warming greatly and while I have no statistics to support this theory yet, I hope readers can help uncover how much of an impact can SaaS have on global warming.

Let's think outside-the-box for a minute and try to find new innovative ways to save our earth by reducing our footprint on the environment and global warming before it is too late.

1. Service Level Agreement

   While Salesforce.com is not backed by an SLA to guarantee service quality and uptime, Salesboom.com offers an SLA with a 99.8% uptime guarantee and a penalty clause that refunds customers 2.5X the downtime!

2. Customer Service & Support

   Salesboom.com exceptional service and support is one major reason why Salesforce.com customers are switching to Salesboom.com. Salesboom.com customers enjoy 24/7/365 live support that Salesforce.com considers to be premium support, for premium customers only and at premium prices as well.

3. One-system solution approach

   Salesboom.com, unlike Salesforce.com; is focused primarily on offering a one-system solution where a business organization uses Salesboom.com to run their entire business operations: Marketing, Sales, Support, Accounting, Inventory, HR, Manufacturing, etc.

   Its not just CRM anymore!

4. User Adoption

   The best CRM system in the world is bound for failure if your employees will not adopt it. While Salesforc.com user interface design is cumbersome, Salesboom.com user interface is so user-friendly and is full of Ajax-features that will reduce the clicks needed to accomplish any system task, such as adding a note to a contact record, with one click without page refreshes. The same task in Salesforce.com will require 5 clicks. Also Salesboom.com provides a monthly account review and when your staff are not using certain features they will be educated on the importance of doing so!

5. Outside-the-box deployment

   Salesforce.com is hard to change, especially with smaller clients. Salesboom.com will deploy solutions that are intriguing and require outside-the-box thinking and cooperation with customers, Salesforc.com does not do that.

6. Restrictions, Restrictions, Restriction!

   Salesforce.com traps Team edition customers and then forces them to pay folds more when they require a feature by making them upgrade to the professional or enterprise editions at folds more. Salesboom.com will allow your company to mix and match editions without the requirement to upgrade all users! If you attempt Integrating Salesforce.com with any other solution you will be forced to upgrade to their flagship enterprise edition, with Salesboom.com there are no similar restrictions. In Salesforce, Team Edition customers also can't add custom fields! The list goes on and on..

They also are adopting a new slogan : It's a Suite thing.™

From what I understand the new release comes with very handy customization tools such as the Ajax-rich layout editor, which will help a company customize their CRM and ERP Salesboom.com account in minutes.

What is interesting is that there are only three companies in the world as of today that offer a wall-to-wall business solution on-demand : Salesboom.com, Netsuite and SAP Business ByDesign.

While SAP had not released their hosted products yet, the other two players are wining the deals.