SugarCRM picks up speed, takes on the market
A bit more than one year ago I asked whether SugarCRM is getting its mojo back after the company shed its open source roots in 2014 and got acquired by Accel-KKR in August 2018. End of July 2019 the company published its renewed vision under CEO Craig Charlton. The vision is “to create a world where companies cultivate customers for life by anticipating and fulfilling needs before customers realize they have them”. It revolves around the three topics Intelligent Customer Experience platform and the underlying ‘time-aware’ data modelNo-Touch Information Management with the idea of enabling users to spend less time entering and searching for data in favor of spending more time with their customersContinuous Cloud Innovation to provide a modern and future proof cloud-based software platform Since then quite some things happened to implement this vision. In addition, SugarCRM held a four-hour virtual analyst summit on November 16, 2020. The Analyst Summit The summit itself was fully live, i.e. without any pre-canned parts, and executed using Zoom, including the break-outs into 1:1’s and small group sessions. At least one of the SugarCRM execs also took advantage of the polling feature during his session. The choice of this format made the event both, not so “cineastic” (the new mot-du-jour for virtual events) and very authentic. I need to say that I prefer authentic over cineastic. The sessions covered the status quo, the overall strategy, a customer testimonial and, of course, future plans of the various products, as usual under NDA, so I will not dive into details here. During all sessions I perceived a genuine interest in feedback for the...
CRMKonvo – Customer Experience and how to do it right
This episode starred Nicole France. Nicole is VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. She focuses on digital marketing, sales effectiveness and customer experience. We planned to talk with her about platforms and their role in the ecosystem; eventually we got there after talking shop about the larger challenge of enabling and embracing customer experience. How can a customer have an experience? What does it take for companies? Are they properly set up to deliver? What is the role of culture? We covered lots of questions before even going into technology, which is a good thing, as customer experience first of all is about people with technology only being an enabler. Only then questions like: Why have platforms become important (again)? What is necessary to make them a success? Are there winning players? What is the role of a CDP in this, if any? Is there a difference between a suite and a platform, and which (hint: there is)? become important. How to make sense of the buzzword bingo between CDP, personalization, Real Time Interaction Management and Customer Journey Orchestration. There are lots of questions, and even more answers, which depend on which vendor one asks. Also, we asked about her opinions on trends for 2021, how the vendors managed COVID-19 so far and where she saw innovations and “spectacular” things to talk about – with an interesting result. But watch and listen for...
Freshworks officially cool now in the club of platform vendors
A few days ago, together with a group of fellow analysts, I was invited to attend the 2020 Freshworks analyst days that covered a lot of ground from corporate vision through strategy and of course, some announcements for the Freshworks Refresh 2020 Global Virtual Conference. These announcements came shortly after the company appeared in the fourth Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2020 and after being ranked #16 in the 2020 Forbes Cloud 100 list. All this clearly shows some ambition – and success. As you may be aware by now, these announcements included Neo, the new Freshworks platform and the new Freshworks CRM product. These two topics created the most discussion points between the Freshworks executives and the analysts. Of course, these two announcements were supported by statements on the corporate vision, mission and current standing as well as product vision. Impressive customer testimonials were not missing, too. My Take This I need to divide into three sections, one about the event itself, one about strategy and one about the new products. Let me start with the analyst day itself. The Analyst Day Of course it was a fully virtual event, thanks to Covid-19. The “day” was split into two sessions of four hours each across two days. Each day was closed with a social gathering after the content sessions, where we could talk shop or just banter, having a drink. This was akin t the lobby talk that one has during breaks or after a day full of information. All sessions were live. There haven’t been any canned statements. Questions that were asked via the chat during the various...