Recently, we partnered with 3Tera to provide support to AppLogic customers, and with another company as well for professional services and support.  We need a way to share customer issues between the three companies, moving them to appropriate people for resolution and yet keeping other company confidential information private.  In addition, we would like to empower our customers to create or check on the status of issues they submit to us.  My CEO would dearly like a way to do more than keep track of sales leads, but rather automate the sales process so that every prospective customer gets adequate sales attention to be sure we've explored the possibilities for a win/win relationship.   So far, ad-hoc tools like excel, Outlook, and email are doing some of the job for us, with great effort from all concerned.  I decided to start looking for a solution that would cost us about $5000 for the first year, for six users.

Having implemented a worldwide CRM system for Hewlett-Packard about 6 years ago, I was sure that by now the benefits of CRM would be easily available to small and medium businesses.  What I have been finding is that there are a lot of products claiming to provide the benefits of CRM, but very few of them deliver on that promise.  And none of the SMB CRM products support barrier-free collaboration of the type that ENKI is looking for, though some come close.  I see small businesses constantly collaborating as I speak with my customers, but I get told repeatedly by CRM vendors that they've never heard of such a thing.   Teamwork, maybe.  Collaboration, no.  

Being a big proponent of open-source software, I thought I'd start with Sugar CRM, a supposedly complete open-source system.  Sugar is developed as open source, but then the company which employs most of the Sugar developers, SugarCRM, adds another 50% functionality and sells it as a product.  The open source version is almost a toy in comparison to the for-pay version, which is priced at close to $500 per seat per year.   Both versions are a bit behind state-of-the-art Web2.0 technology and  are a bit clunky to use.  Essential features which ENKI needs, like a customer Portal for self-service support, cost extra.  Not only that, but SugarCRM sells you the software to install on your server, but then charges you the same amount every year.  That doesn't feel like win/win to me, and it's a strange Software-as-a-Service model - without the service.  Sugar's hand always seemed to be out, begging for more money, but even worse they seemed to be interfering with the open source aspect of the product by releasing an enhancement and then mysteriously having their employees stop working on the previously free open-source version of the same feature.  Hey, everyone's gotta make a living, but if you say something's open source...

I also looked at Info At Hand, another proprietary customization of Sugar CRM open source code, with at least 50% more features added, including a spiffy simple cell phone interface, enhanced customizability, and some features for front-of-the-house financial processes that would greatly enhance our Quickbooks-based accounting.  However, the Long Reach corporation, a small company that provides Info At Hand, seemed overwhelmed by my pre-sales support questions.  Their "free trial" online version was neither: I ran into bugs or intentionally disabled features, which when added to spotty documentation meant that I couldn't get some important features to work.  They suggested that I purchase the software and install it, and then they'd support me.  Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to buy and install something just to see if it was right for me, especially since my interaction with them produced doubts about how well they'd be able to support me after the sale.  While their prices for support are reasonable, the limit of one case per seat per year had me wondering what would happen if I asked more than six questions for my six seats, especially when I already had more than six questions written down.  I may yet follow their suggestion to buy and try out of frustration with the alternatives, but I haven't gotten that far yet.  

There's another open-source CRM product, called Centric.  I'm evaluating it now.  I don't think it will meet my needs because it's not as configurable for some special requirements I have, such as tracking which hardware a customer of ENKI's is being hosted on.  Also reports and workflow customizations have to be written in Java, something nobody here at ENKI has time to do.  The jury is out, but at least the company is considerably more engaging and listening-oriented than SugarCRM or Long Reach has been.

I also took a look at the two "biggies" in hosted CRM: Salesforce.com and NetSuite.  I was struck by how unmotivated the SalesForce sales team was, taking days to contact me or respond to questions.  Well hey, it is August.  Or maybe their product is selling so well that they don't need to call back.  I can believe it: the tool itself is very user-friendly and intuitive.  I instantly fell in love with it, but at $1500/seat/year, you need more than love to make a purchase, you need what you need to run your business.  I haven't been able to answer that question yet.  What's nice about their product offering is that the pricing is very clear.  I can tell what I'll be paying a year for now if I grow by a few seats.

I also took a "test drive" of the NetSuite product.  If you've read this site, you know that I used to manage their development team.  So, I have some knowledge about how the product works and more than a little loyalty to the company and the people in it as I remember my time there with great fondness.  However, the product is very expensive, so I can't let my feelings get in the way of making a sound judgment on whether the software is right for my business.  My "test drive" was quite successful and I was able to demonstrate that the system could do what ENKI needs.  Also, NetSuite's sales people went out of their way to make sure I was successful with the trial, including spending some time with me on a Saturday.  I'd really like to buy the product, since its features both support my partner-collaboration model as well as provide a great customer interface.  But their pricing model is confusing with lots of extra-cost options that you might find necessary as you try to get the system to do what you want.  The cost of the system climbs rapidly and unpredictably as your company grows.  So, it's really difficult to know what I'll be paying in a year, or even six months.  That's pretty scary, and I have sympathy for their salespeople:  it must be quite difficult to sell the product.  The initial investment for ENKI is probably around $10,000 - including implementation assistance and fixed yearly charges that disappointingly contradict the pay-as-you-go promise of Software-as-a-Service.

I also looked at some expensive traditional boxed-software products, but they are well over my $6000 desired budget, often heading north of $20,000 for fewer features than the other products I looked at.   Or, you can go to Fry's (the local computer store) and buy boxed software that will act as a fancy contact manager, which is far short of my needs.  I even tried a free trial CD of Microsoft's Dynamics CRM, but couldn't figure out how to use it.  It looks totally unconfigured, like a blank slate.  I called them to confirm that what I was seeing was what they were offering either as a boxed product or as a hosted service and they said yes.  In my business, I need to be able to run with the product out of the box, even if I know there is lots of configuration in its future, so that choice was out.  There are also a gaggle of CRM systems which focus mostly on sales and marketing - often little more than intelligent spam generators.  The worst offender I found was a product called "Infusion" whose vendor not only bombarded me with chatty overly-familiar sales entreaties, but also seems to be responsible for a lot of the other chatty spam that I get on a daily basis from other companies.  It must work for them, as the chatty ads claim, but it doesn't work for me!

It's been a pretty discouraging journey so far.  Either I have to get in bed with a vendor who clearly doesn't understand ENKI's win-win business model and isn't likely to be a successful partner for us, or I can spend much more than I'd like to get something that will do the job.  My other option - a suite of single-point solutions for sales, finance, support, and knowledge management is looking better and better, though I learned rather painfully at Hewlett-Packard how difficult it is to manage "islands of automation" as your company grows and needs change.  In any case, the cost of setting up a CRM system isn't just in the software: it's also in the initial customization you have to make to the system (and your employees) to support your own company's workflows, as well as all the data you have to enter before it becomes useful as a business tool.  

So for the moment, there isn't a solution that I like.  I'll keep you up-to-date on my adventures here in the blog, or - if all goes well - you will simply see the CRM system in action on ENKI's web site.  Or so I hope! 

Here at ENKI, we keep up a dialog with our customers about what we can do to make them more successful.  From the time we founded ENKI, we have envisioned providing IT operations services to customers who didn't want to build their own operations department.  Over time, we have added capabilities and products, such as our Computing Utility, to achieve this goal.

This evening, I was having dinner with a principal from one of my consulting customers, a Web 2.0 startup.  He told me about his critical dissatisfaction with his current hosting vendor.  His analysis was that they just want to lease him hardware, and that they can't support that mysterious interface between his web application and the hardware and operating system they're selling him, leaving him to develop IT operations skills in-house.  He wants his company's IT operations to just work, so he can concentrate on making his business succeed and prepare for his go-live event.  His CEO is putting pressure on him to solve the problem, fast.

Sure, he knows someone who used to set up data centers for banks, and he could call this guy and get a data center built for his company.  But the cost, delays, and hassle seem overwhelming to him.  But he'd do it if he had to.  Or, he could continue to lease machines from a hosting company, and hire an administrator to configure the hardware and networking to support his application - which could include clustering and other configurations that the hosting vendor might not support.  But in any case, he would be responsible for designing and supporting the infrastructure, which he finds costly and difficult since his expertise is in creating software applications.

Over the course of the dinner, I heard more and more about what he really wanted from his hosting vendor:

1. Computing delivered as a utility, on a pay-for-what-you-use basis, so that he doesn't have to invest in capital equipment or excess capacity.
2. A predictable sales model and pricing so he knows what he'll be paying as he grows and he can trust his vendor to be a partner.
3. Ability to rapidly scale up hardware resources in his data center, such as if his company has a successful launch.
4. High reliability of the hosting service.  This could include rapid failover, data backup, and more.
5. No restrictions on how his software is written, so that he can simply deploy it into the data center.
6. Adequate support to ensure that any problems he has are addressed quickly, whether they are handled by the vendor or his staff.
7. Deep technical knowledge regarding IT operations from his operations vendor, so that he can get any assistance he needs to quickly roll out his application.
8. Infrastructure technology that allows easy management, scaling, failover, and provisioning of his computing infrastructure and applications. 
9. A sincere desire on the part of the vendor to partner with him for his success, with the flexibility to match his particular needs
10. Any and all services from the vendor so that he'll never need to build an IT operations capability himself, nor seek funding to pay for it.

I've started calling this set of offerings outsourced Operations as a Service, or OaaS - sort of a counterpart to SaaS, software as a service.  I've modified ENKI's website to communicate this value proposition.  I'd be interested and grateful to hear from you about what you think are the essential elements of an OaaS strategy that would meet your company's needs.

Being a science fiction fan and a computer enthusiast, I was bound to come across Neil Stephenson's novel, "Snow Crash" sooner or later.  It is a story of the near future, in which large corporations control the world and the governments of the world are subservient to them.  Much of the true action in the world actually happens in the "Metaverse", a simulated world akin to Second Life.  The story revolves around a real-world hero, named Hiro Protagonist, who struggles to save the world - real and simulated - from a techno-fundamentalist guru who is controlling the minds of his followers using ancient Sumerian knowledge, originally developed by the Sumerian god, Enki.  It's a great story, and I won't spoil it for you... but it had enough information in it about Enki to pique my curiosity. 

Later, I read more about about translations of the ancient Sumerian history and cosmology in books by Zecharia Sitchin, who translated ancient fired clay tablets that told the story of how Enki created humans through gene splicing of apes and an alien species, of which Enki was a member.  While Sitchin's translations are often questioned, they do tell a beautiful story of how Enki, a supremely capable scientist, created humanity, fell in love with it, and tried to save it from a catastrophic flood - the precursor to the story of Noah in the Bible.  And the lack of other competent translations that challenge Sitchin's interpretations leaves a delicious, lingering question about Enki's actual existence hanging in the air.

Enki actually translates in Sumerian to EN.KI, or honorable ruler of Earth.  His playful demeanor, technological savvy, love for humanity, and example of capable and enlightened leadership all are reflected in the intentions behind the founding of ENKI.