Loading ...Having just written about why Richard thinks on-premise CRM is better than on demand CRM, it’s time to talk about the opposite from Eric’s point of view. Eric favors on-demand CRM and goes on to explain the key benefits.
A common belief is that on the man systems are unable to integrate with companies existing systems. That’s not necessarily true since most on-demand applications come with open APIs which allows you to integrate easily.
An API is basically tech talk for any system. APIs allow one system to talk to another system in a very open way. When you tell developers within your company that a system as an API, they are usually thrilled because it means a lot less custom work and hacks to allow the systems to communicate.
Another common belief that Eric talks about is that on-demand applications lack functionality and aren’t very flexible. It’s funny though because a study done by Gartner estimates that 50% or more of software functionality never gets used. What does that mean? Functionality can sometimes be overrated and never used within an organization.
He then goes on to say that on-demand vendors give customers exactly what they use unlike on-premise CRM where most of your features and functionalities will end up being shelfware.
another good point is that a lot of IT spending each year is considered “dead money” where it’s spent more on keeping the fans running and lights on versus contributing to business process improvements. With hosted scratch that with on-demand CRM, that “dead money” can be used for more important projects.
You can read his entire article over at Network World and also my comments on Richards article as well.
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“Eric” is Eric Berridge of Bluewolf, a leading On-Demand consulting company (and, yeah, my employer
).