Archive for November, 2009
Dreamforce 09: BMC Joins The Force.com Cloud
Even though this year’s Dreamforce wasn’t as well attended as Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, the conference’s energy level, and the scope of their guests (from San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom to former Secretary of State Colin Powell)—can’t help but lend to the excitement people are feeling about the rise of on-demand services. And yesterday, two IT management heavyweights announced their services would be available via Salesforce.com within the next year.
Salesforce has been hyping up the Force.com developer platform as a means of stepping outside their CRM categorization, and yesterday BMC and CA both announced they’ll soon be offering apps built on Force.com. CA is adding its Agile Planner to the platform, and BMC’s Service Desk Express will be sold, marketed, and available via Salesforce.com. The assumption here is that more companies will be able to partake of these services once they are set in the cloud.
The bigger message in terms of the IT management market is that this is a “back-office†sector that is moving toward SaaS. The CEOs of both BMC and CA were at the conference, and both declined to give pricing details, but the assumption is that these Force.com-based services will be available to those already subscribing to their IT management platforms. Demands for more cost-efficient productivity suites are rising across all technology segments, and this is proof that going forward, IT management vendors are going to need to offer cloud components (at least) to remain competitive.
No commentsZendesk Gets A Social Media Boost from BatchBlue Software
Today, social CRM provider BatchBlue announced an integration for their BatchBook product with Zendesk’s help desk platform. The integration targets small businesses, and the collaboration came from both vendors belonging to The Small Business Web association.
The integration will allow BatchBook users to connect their contact database into Zendesk’s help desk ticket processing, which ultimately saves time by creating a unified tracking source, and a an extensive reference point that supplies professional, personal, and social networking information. Furthermore, BatchBook’s “SuperTags†functionality can be used to create custom fields that capture individualized data about active support calls.
President of BatchBlue Software, Pamela O’Hara, said she was particularly excited about the venture because it will make their product “even more social,†which is an interesting choice of words for enterprise software. Nonetheless, it is wise partnership, as help desk systems are the enterprise systems that benefit the most from social media; smaller businesses benefit from it as well. Plenty of SMBs will be eager to streamline their customer service, and this enables them to do that and simultaneously bolster customer relationships, which tend to be stronger in smaller businesses.
No commentsTruliant Federal Credit Union Uses KACE Hardware As Software
Truliant Federal Credit Union announced this week they’re had great success using KACE’s KBOX hardware as, well, software.
Truliant has locations in four Southeastern states, and are using KBOX Systems Management Appliances—“help desks in a boxâ€â€”to perform mass software upgrades, keep track of inventory, and answer questions. About 500 end users are utilizing six different appliances, and each has been designated a specific help-desk purpose. End users can log in tickets for support of Truliant’s devices, which range from PCs to servers to ATMs; one of their support specialists, Jason Allen, says this KBOX network is for everything but their core system, which is controlled by another department.
The KACE solution is different from traditional help desk systems in that it uses hardware for deployment, and each of the boxes are hardened and self-healing, with applications for remote support, asset management, and other functions. KACE executives say they’ve had great success implementing software systems via hardware packages, and Allen said that once the support team learned to properly use the KBOX system, it was smooth sailing.
Perhaps more importantly, KACE’s package cost Truliant about $20,000 less than their previous help desk software; it’s also saving staff hours, which is an indirect savings. KACE’s VP Marketing, Wynn White, says he expects this system will have even greater success when enterprises shift to Windows 7.
No commentsExpinion.net Makes Twitter Work for Them
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An instance where Twitter makes an efficient CRM tool: when it’s used to supplement help desk software. Yesterday, Canadian help desk software company Expinion.net launched Twitter capture technology with its version 3.0, giving subscribers to the on-demand service the ability to track support results on the social media site.
Several companies use Twitter for customer service ends (like digital-services provider Comcast), and it is very helpful for finding troubled customers before they come to you. Companies can find out what’s being said about their brand and products, and reach out to them with Twitter directly from the help desk administration, to offer support and find a solution. There’s also a branding bonus with Twitter integration: since the stream is crawled regularly, this method of customer support is good for public relations and for driving traffic to the company’s website.
With Expinion’s Twitter capture technology, relevant tweets are actually stored in the help desk platform, along with other tickets and internal projects. Furthermore, users can track progress made with each tweet over a longer term. Many CRM sectors are finding it difficult to incorporate the unstructured data coming from social networking sites, but it’s nice to see that one such sector can actually make good use of Twitter.
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