thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Nimble Goes Blue

Nimble Goes Blue

The future of Nimble is blue – Azure blue. The News This is not about the colour of hope (which is blue, at least, if you are a German, like me), but about the long pending final migration of Nimble to Azure. The company announced on May 22 that it has successfully migrated its leading SaaS Social Sales application from Amazon Web Services to Azure. According to the press release this migration was accomplished in less than four weeks without impact on Nimble customers or, as the press release stated “without a hitch”. With this move Nimble can now “tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem to scale”. According to the press release the company reports that, Microsoft being “a global Nimble reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office 365, demand for the easy-to-use CRM for small workgroups is surging”. Then there are two further interesting pieces covered in the press release. For one: with this move Nimble also “accelerates the delivery of its upcoming 5.0 release using the Azure Platfrom as a Servce (…) and by integrating Common Data Services, Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow”. Nimble 5.0 shall deliver a “company wide team relationship manager that unifies contacts from siloed departments in sales, marketing, customer service, and accounting for Office 365 and G Suite users”. The release of Nimble 5.0 is targeted for June 2019. Second, Nimble emphasizes on the power of ecosystems by putting a spotlight on Nimble being the only ISV on Microsoft’s CSP Cloud Solution Provider marketplace that uses CSP to build a global distribution channel. Nimble does this by...
Here’s why Nimble is so successful

Here’s why Nimble is so successful

The News In the past few weeks there have been two interesting announcements by Nimble. First, on June 14, 2018 Nimble announced a partnership with Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics VARs in North America. Velosio and Nimble entered into a global reseller agreement. As a part of this agreement Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365. Velosio is the latest prominent name in among the growing number of Microsoft/Nimble partners. One week later, on June 20, 2018 Nimble announced a revamp of its application homepage with the Nimble Today page. This dashboard page gives the user a clear and customizable view of their sales pipeline, calendar appointments, tasks and social signals with relationship insights directly embedded in the widgets. As a start the page offers 6 widgets Deals Events Tasks Highlighted Contacts Signals Stage Funnel that can get freely rearranged. The Today Page is also available for iOS users now and will be available to Android users soon. The Bigger Picture The enterprise CRM market is saturated. There are at least 4 tier one players for every major CRM function that are competing for supremacy. Customer demands have evolved from requiring transactional applications to getting high value solutions that allow the delivery of high-end customer (and user) experience. The market itself has morphed from a suite market to a best-of-breed application market, and now to a platform and ecosystem market. In this market it is important to excel in two, maybe three areas: Platform as a Service (PaaS). The platform itself must support current and future technologies that...
Nimble and Microsoft are Getting ever Closer

Nimble and Microsoft are Getting ever Closer

It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other. Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any  other smaller vendor tools. The logical next step is to … … integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365.  I already speculated about this in my February post: Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce,...