In case you missed them, here’s my 60 second bullet point round-up of the main CRM software stories last quarter:
April
- Salesforce.com take a cue from Amazon’s ‘Mayday’ customer support feature on the Kindle Fire to add a new SOS capability to its Service Cloud which enables customers to be connected to a support representative via video chat at the touch of a button.
- IBM announces that it will purchase privately held marketing automation provider Silverpop. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- Third party support provider, Rimini Street, announces Cloud Services designed to allow customers to migrate to cloud based solutions such as Salesforce while maintaining legacy system such as Siebel.
- Cloud-based ERP/CRM provider Netsuite announced its Q1 results with revenues up 34% year on year.
- SugarCRM announced that its revenues were up 38% year on year for the first quarter of 2014.
May
- Salesforce.com announces a net loss of $96.9M for its first quarter. Revenues were up 37% year on year.
- Microsoft’s Spring Update, featuring new customer support and social listening capabilities starts to become available to users.
June
- Salesforce.com and Microsoft announce a surprise partnership designed to provide greater interoperability between Salesforce’s CRM software and Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Azure and Office.
- Oracle purchases Micros, developer of point of sale and enterprise information systems for the retail and hospitality industries, for $5.3 billion.
- Oracle announces the acquisition of LiveLOOK whose co-browsing functionality is used to help resolve customer support issues and will fill out Oracle’s service cloud.
In Summary
There’s little let up in the rate of acquisitions as traditional enterprise vendors look to fill out their cloud-based offerings.
Perhaps the big surprise of the quarter was the new partnership between Microsoft and Salesforce.com. While this may prove a win for Microsoft overall I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of the Dynamics team as some of their competitive advantage over Salesforce potentially erodes.
Anyway, that concludes my 60 second take on the CRM industry news for the last quarter. If I’ve missed or misunderstood anything significant please feel free to comment!
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A well-written article on the recent CRM Industry updates. Just goes on to show that the CRM industry has a strong potentiality to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years.
I would just like to add that this year some new CRM companies have also emerged to the horizon that should make it to the news. For example – SalesLoft, WalkMe, Really Simple Systems and Converge Enterprise, Inc. All these CRM companies have got great reviews at CRM Idol competition. In fact Converge Enterprise, Inc is one of the select CRM companies that have been successively featured twice in CRM Idol.