Cloud-based CRM systems dominating market

Cloud-based CRM application vendors are brimming with boundless excitement. The good news for them is cloud-based CRM systems are receiving faster adoption. According to a recent report published by Gartner, 41% of total CRM systems sold in 2013 are SaaS-based. With growing investment in digital initiatives and customer experience management, the media and IT services companies are leading the CRM spend globally, with manufacturing segment is holding the second place, and banking and securities industry retains the third position. Gartner finds that companies across the board are looking for a hassle-free, easy-to-deploy CRM system with capability to scale up or scale down depending upon the business requirement.

Gartner further predicts that the CRM growth will be visibly sustainable in 2014-15 like the last three years’ journey. With CRM revenue touching USD 23.9 billion in 2014, the cloud-based CRM revenue is projected to account for 49%, and this will touch 50% in 2015. Thus, a steady growth in the cloud-based CRM systems adaptability is an indication of bright future in this segment. According to an analyst at Gartner, the largest spenders of CRM will include banking, securities, high-tech, telecommunications, media, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and IT manufacturing and services verticals. All these industries require a better customer experience even during slump period.

As customer relationships are shifting faster from transaction- to context-based scenarios, the growth in the CRM market is determined by the integration of social media and many other third-party applications. Today, every company has a social media strategy to enhance the customer relationships. The contextual mode of customer conversations happening widely on social networking channels provides a reason for the companies to integrate the customer data (along with conversations) into CRM strategy. In fact, the customer-driven communications is transforming the deployment model of CRM systems. As cloud CRM vendors are offering advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) for businesses to integrate with a number of innovative technologies such as mobility and social media, the demand for cloud-based CRM systems is gaining ground.

For a cloud-based CRM, the integration process is faster and easier compared to premise-based CRM systems. When a business requires a customization in sales and marketing process, the cloud-based CRM systems allow vendors to integrate lightweight APIs without halting the operations. Various functions such as social feeds, geo-centric customer touch points like usage of Google map, and mobility of users can be integrated with social media exchanges and smart apps. The growth of smartphones is another trigger for the cloud CRM vendors to provide with mobility feature as a default offering to clients. Along with mobility platform, custom smart apps are adding a new dimension to the utility of cloud CRM.

Cloud CRM allows the businesses to access customer data anywhere, anytime. As multi-national companies are operating in multiple geographies, the real-time accessibility of customer data is an important aspect of customer service. Improved collaboration, mobility, and flexibility of usage offer a better edge to the cloud CRM. Since cloud CRM systems are hosted in a data center, the cost of deployment is also drastically reduced. The hassles of managing capital-intensive IT staff are also significantly lowered in cloud CRM implementation.

While businesses are unequivocally moving toward cloud-delivered IT solutions, the CXOs are seriously considering the short- and long-term business benefits. Apart from lower IT investment, cloud CRM delivers a plethora of benefits comprising operational, technical and financial.

Here are some benefits that cloud CRM offers:

Lower cost of ownership: Today, companies opine capex (capital expenditure) a bad operational strategy and hence they convincingly follow the opex (operational expenditure) model that cloud CRM delivers. The immediate business benefit that cloud CRM offers is the lower total cost of ownership. Since the cloud CRM is hosted in a public or private cloud, the infrastructure cost including servers, office space, and IT resources is significantly reduced.

Scalable system: The cloud CRM inherently possesses the software architecture that can be scaled up or down depending upon the business requirement of the client. Being multi-tenant and modular, cloud CRM provides a huge leg room for the business owners to customize their licensing requirement.

Global access: As the CRM system is deployed on data center it can be accessed by users anywhere, simply through an Internet connection. This feature of cloud CRM allows business owners expand their geographic reach without much difficulty.

Smart collaboration: Collaboration is the new normal of a customer-centric application. Since CRM needs a huge interfacing between service staff and customers, the cloud provides the opportunity for the business to integrate with various social media networks and external application. This helps develop a collaborative environment wherein the customer can effortlessly reach out to a service representative during business exigency. Furthermore, the social CRM requires a qualitative interaction between customers and service agents. The marketing, sales, and other functions can collaborate among themselves without requiring any technical handholding.

No maintenance: Cloud CRM requires minimum to no maintenance efforts. This allows higher uptime and lower expenditure on maintenance staff.

Multi-layered security: Today, tier-1 data centers deploy multi-layered security measures to avoid any kind of untoward situation. Since cloud CRM is a multi-tenant system, the vendor provide security measures at various levels such as physical, network, application, server, and database. Data center service providers follow the global security standards to ensure the optimum safety to critical customer information.

Easy upgrade: Software upgrade is common feature in the life cycle of a product. However, in case of on-premises CRM system, the normal software upgrade takes a toll on operation. During upgrade the live application is curtailed from use. On the contrary, cloud CRM doesn’t need such formalities. The software vendor can upgrade the system without disturbing the operational schedule of the clients. Sometimes the CRM vendors also don’t charge for the upgrade, as these features come as a value-add options to increase subscriptions.

Quick customization: In a normal CRM system, any customization requires more time as the complexity of architecture takes the vendor to use more IT resources. However, in cloud CRM the customization is more flexible, and it doesn’t impact the operations of the client. Regarding the cost of customization, the cloud CRM provides option to reduce the customization cost depending upon the usage.

Faster implementation: In a cloud CRM, the implementation is almost done in real-time, if there is no complex client business requirement.

Increased productivity: The cloud CRM offers better reliability in comparison to on-premises CRM. The 24x7 accesses and flexibility of operation allow employees even work while at home or in transit. Customer information can be retrieved from any place using mobility devices. Since the office-centric work expand beyond the premises, all the functions can work independently as well as in a collaborative manner. This gives more opportunities for the employees to reach out to the customers and resolve their issues.

Reliability: Today, the public cloud vendors offer 99.9% uptime for the hosted applications. A higher uptime is highly reliable for the business to ensure sustained operations.

Agility: The promptness of accessing customer information from cloud CRM provides a better competitive edge to the clients. The client employees can easily access the system via Internet. The independence of IT infrastructure adds more flexibility to the employees to leverage the speed of access.

Globally large enterprises are also looking for moving toward cloud CRM. But the strategy is a bit different from what SMEs are adopting. Given the security of critical customer data, the large enterprises trust the private cloud instead of public cloud. The large enterprises also leverage the same benefits such as reduced cost, mobility, high automation, server redundancy, flexible and scalable operations, quality of service, and certainly the security of customer information. Greater control over private cloud provides enterprises more flexibility to deliver quality customer services.

Mission BYOD: Are Risks Worth Taking?

With growing proliferation of smart mobile devices in the consumer market, the new age professionals have quickly shifted from PCs to laptops, tablets, and smart phones. According to IT Consumer Survey conducted by IDC in April 2011, while 88 percent consumers surveyed use a desktop to access Internet for business or personal use, 91 percent use a laptop, 80 percent use smart phone, and 36 percent use a tablet for the same purpose. This is an indication of how fast the smart devices are being penetrated into consumer space. Driven by this trend enterprises are compelled to introduce bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model in the organization. In the first place, this trend not only helps enterprises save spiraling IT infrastructure cost significantly, but also it improves the productivity of employees. Nevertheless, this comes with a caveat – challenges associated with enterprise data security. Now that the enterprises can't reverse the trend of smart work culture, the limited option left for them is to evaluate various dimensions of risks associated with BYOD model and smartly implement an enterprise-wide data security program.

Here are some major concerns that pose serious deliberations before allowing BYOD program in the organization.

• Does the organization have a full-proof BYOD policy?
• Does the organization have a stringent security policy related to critical data exchange over employee devices?
• How will these devices be connected to various data servers in the organization?
• What if the employee leaves or gets fired?
• What if the employee device is lost or theft and passed to a rouge element?
• What are the IT infrastructural limitations for mobility programs?
• What are the monitoring programs for keeping a tab upon a variety of heterogeneous devices?

Advantages of BYOD

Every technology revolution has its fair share of advantages. And the growing trend of smart mobile device adoption by employees at workplaces has more edges. According to a study on BYOD conducted by Cisco, 76 percent respondents said that adopting to BYOD was somewhat or extremely positive for their organizations. The same study reveals that BYOD apart from operational excellence there is a significant cost benefit. As per some estimation done by Cisco, an employee engaged in BYOD can benefit the organization in the range of $300 to $1300. Primarily, the companies allowing BYOD accrue the following benefits.

• Optimized employee performance: Smart devices provide more flexibility to contemporary work culture. They also increase collaboration among employees, management, and customers. Employees can be equally productive while they are traveling or working from home.
• Enhanced employee satisfaction: While employees are allowed to bring their own smart devices to work place, they never crib about obsolete desktop, as often provisioned by the organization. Since they are convenient with their own devices and also they understand the nuances of usage, their independence from the buckles of IT helpdesk provides a sense of contentment.
• Increased client satisfaction: Mostly employees working in the sales and support program quickly respond to customers' concerns, which ultimately elevates customer satisfaction.
• Significant cost savings: With employees taking care of their own devices, companies save a significant portion of IT spending on purchase of hardware and other allied devices. Moreover, companies can save on phone plans, SMS plans, Internet services, and helpdesk overhead.
• Reduced management intervention: Allowing BYOD to employees, the management eliminates a number of additional responsibilities such as selection of vendors, monitoring of employee data usage, and purchase decisions.

Risks Associated with BYOD

While enterprises leverage the benefits of BYOD, there are some genuine concerns as well. According to a survey conducted by Mimecast in 2012, 74 percent respondents emphasized that the biggest challenge of BYOD is information security. By allowing employees' own mobile devices to premises, companies open a floodgate of security and privacy issues that could cost them huge amount of money in terms of fine and critical data loss. Here are some critical risks that spring from the BYOD program.

• Security threats: Mobile devices, especially smart phones, are often vulnerable to hacking. Since mobile platforms are not matured yet the security risks associated with them are not well articulated by device makers. When an employee downloads a new application there is enough chance that the software might be a malware or a tracking program that can eavesdrop any conversation taking place over the device.
• Spreading of malware in the network: If the device is connected through a Wi-Fi or Bluethooth, there is a larger possibility of that the device can play a dumb to tricks of hackers who can spread malware in the entire network. Malware can cause a huge loss of enterprise data and customer information.
• Loss or theft of devices: Since mobile devices are small and easily portable, they are prone to loss and theft. That threatens the loss of critical enterprise data.
• Lack of enterprise-level security controls: As employees use a variety of devices and all that operate on different platforms, it become quite cumbersome for the organization to streamline a single security blanket policy.
• Spamming: Unsolicited messages and contents eats out the bandwidth and storage. Although spams can't directly pose threat to data, any response to that can create otherwise.
• Phishing activities: Phishing is a serious concern for mobile devices as users can't detect it right there as often they can do in PCs and laptops.

Managing the Risks

Risks are often thwarted when they are understood well. In case of BYOD, organizations not only face security challenges, but also they come across with a slew of legal challenges as well. For example, loss of customer information, which is protected under privacy act, can draw huge legal complications for the organization. In the recent time, companies like Facebook and Yahoo have lost millions of customers' personal information to hackers. That indeed reflects how vulnerable the large technology enterprise are. But for any organization, small or big, a comprehensive policy on data security and framework for workable BYOD model can ensure the benefits of smart work culture. A report titled “Five steps to a successful BYOD program” published by Forrester, emphasizes that the more an employee has access to privileged data, the more powerful should be the information security rules.

The organizations can consider the following strategies to avoid susceptible risks and leverage the advantages of BYOD program. Before allowing employees to bring their own mobile devices to the workplace, the companies should enact a comprehensive BYOD policy, which would address major BYOD concerns.

The BYOD policy should include, but not limited to the aspects such as employee usage, mobile security, data protection, data encryption, password protection, identity and access control, wireless access control, social media usage, internet browsing control, anti-virus/anti-malware software provisioning, anti-spam procedures, anti-phishing procedures, application security, incident reporting, and above all an enterprise-wide employee training on all these issues.

Conclusion

Technological revolutions in the past have brought both opportunities and risks on the same platter. Not a single technology invented till date is absolutely free from some genuine challenges. Organizations encouraging their employees to adopt BYOD must consider the key challenges first and then devise a comprehensive BYOD policy across the organization in order to optimize the benefits of this program.

An idea can change your life

Ideas are free; they're like strands of sperm lying idle in the scrotum of a man, absolutely inane until and unless they find a chance to unite with an ovule to chart out a subtle transformation into an embryo inside the womb of a woman, who in all probability promises to take every precaution to protect the fetus till it grows into a full-fledged baby, ready to be delivered in due course. The anecdote, on the surface, may sound bit queer and weird, but the fact remains every idea that gets germinated in the vacuum of somebody's mental space is even more trivial than the existence of a strand of sperm.

Any average literate person can suggest thousands of ideas, which many would find seriously exciting and of extreme significance with reference to their applicability in human society; nonetheless, if someone asks them whether they can realize the intended benefits at large, probably the respond would be unequivocally imbecilic. Why do then people anxiously accentuate on the formation or garnering of ideas, even quite sporadically, by harping on a false notion of changing this world for once and all? Aren't we really becoming too itching about an uncertainty that has a rare chance of occurrence with its projected impact until all the preconditions somehow converge or made to work in tandem as per the plan? Or are we seriously dwelling on a phenomenon that certainly has overreaching consequence?

Well, let's stick to the principle that any and every great idea can transform this world to even a much better place to live in, but the moot question here is whether that idea can be hatched by itself to deliver the desired benefits? Never. It certainly needs scores of other factors – time, effort, and money - which contribute to the incubation of a raw idea. Eventually when all preconditions are met, an idea converts to an exciting piece of product, which can provide profound benefits to the person who owns it.

So what it boils down to the fact that ideas are certainly exciting so long as there is somebody to metamorphose them into great products with continuous support, and for that someone needs the desired skill, scale, discipline, and devotion. That's why the top global institutes like MIT, Bell Labs, and NASA are not just idea givers, rather they are, to the core, staunch idea incubators, which in all possibility, have the desired caliber, capability and scale to transform an idea into a world-class technology. And they are doing it as well. Unfailingly.

Before winding up let me cite here one interesting example on how a weird idea for a nondescript technology start-up becomes a matter of exciting technological innovation for one of the best technology companies in which they could able to foresee the future of virtual teleportation. For that the company even didn't hesitate to invest to the tune of Rs. 1000 millions. Well, by now it's quite clear what it makes to hatch an idea that can change your life. Nevertheless, not just an idea alone can!

The wounds that never soothe

After 25 years of that fateful day at Chernobyl, the chilling trepidation of nuclear disaster still echoes from the ghost town, and never settles to die down in the memory of human civilization. Thousands people died instantly after the disaster, millions fled away after being exposed to high degree radioactive emission and those who survived the death trap of this potentially calamitous revolutionary technological progress are still suffering from the pangs orchestrated by mindless pursuits of mankind negotiated for small comforts of society – the comforts that never reach to those people who for all splendors of human development are forced to bury their lives under the perfidious design of the ruling class.

The spirit of human settlements that once dotted around Chernobyl will never resurrect from that epochal nightmare. The survivors even shiver today when they brood over the consequences of a diabolic nuclear disaster that the mankind can never forget and forgive those people who for all their boundless human greed put the entire human civilization at the brink of danger. Even today the newborn babies inherit the curse of dangerous technology. Physically deformed, mentally agonized, these children of post-Chernobyl fallout are the reflection of our imbecilic hankering for technological progress that has always posed myriads of threats to the sustenance of nature. We forget for a moment that the fascinating advantages of a hugely risk-ridden technology cant overwhelm the piles of danger that it intrinsically bears within.

After 25 years we are still crestfallen. The recent meltdown of nuclear plants at Fukushima, triggered by a series of potentially catastrophic earthquakes and tsunami, has again posed serious doubts on the safety of a hazardous technology that many duplicitous protagonists vouch for its economic importance in a world of acute energy crunch. But the moot question here that slaps on our face is: Can we bargain with a crocodile to get rid of a tiger? This is a catch-22 situation. The imminent dangers of climatic changes due to toxic effluents of fossil fuels used in thermal power plants are equally threatening to the sustenance of this world. Now is the time for a serious contemplation. We must engage collectively to think about a third alternative which could be pro-nature, pro-mankind, and sustain the continuous human progress.

The Adventurism of Social Media

“Social networking sites are bloody suckers for Internet users,” blasted one of my old school cronies. He may be right on his own context. And why shouldn't he retort that way when his wife, an ad professional in a reputed agency, dated her boss regularly in rendezvous decided well in advance in cryptic parlance over different social media. Then she, in all her resounding conscience, smarted up to the occasion in the pretext of certain professional engagements with her clients. Sounds quite banal and inappropriate. I felt pity for this poor chap when he narrated his sordid saga to me last week. I couldn't stop laughing for the simple reason that how immature was my poor friend in jumping to the conclusion and blaming his wife's escapade to the ill impact of social media in entirety. Well, that's another nondescript instance like a pesky item number in a well-packaged movie. But on a serious note, social media had nothing to do with the misfortune of my friend, it's another social aberration that may happen anywhere in any society. It could even have happened without the presence of social media.

The biggest gift of social media is collaboration and reach. A decade before when netizens started using email and chat as collaborative tools, the communication process was two-way – the sender and the receiver; however, with the surge of social media, the real collaboration or multi-way communication became possible. For example, someone twits on any issue, it reaches out to the entire community, and that's the beauty of social media which empowers its avid users with a platform to collaborate on anything and everything under the sun. This is another pillar representing the free speech in a democratic world. The impact can't be marginalized by justifying its effects on social dynamics. The entire world is opening, in a sense that the floodgates of information from billions of social media posts is reaching out to the empowered, decisive consumers in a big way. Imagine how the Wikileak's adventurous journey in digging out the gravel of bureaucratic red tapes and informing the facts hidden behind the sinister design of ruling class hegemony across the nations. This is just the beginning of a new age information war, the next episode would be more dramatic, powerful, and effusive to sweep away the entire human race to a point where the war of words could be more powerful than the impact of a nuclear bomb.