Is it right to say there are not as many integration issues around customer service applications compared to sales applications?
There are a lot more. Here's the difference: in a sales application, the sales rep uses the application for 30 minutes a day because they are just out selling. In a customer service environment, the agent is in the application eight hours a day – essentially this is their desktop. The vendor has to deliver a desktop that allows that agent to answer any question a customer may ask. For example – where is my order? That financial transaction data tends to be stored in the accounting system so we have done integrations with SAP, and with Oracle financials.
There are myths promulgated by the dinosaurs in an attempt to preserve their existence. By dinosaurs I really mean the traditional enterprise software vendors. They say, "Oh well, you can't integrate," well Web services really removes the location of the data centre as an issue when doing integrations.
"It's not secure" is another claim. Well, ISS is a customer of ours, we host their solution. They also say, "Well, you can't customise it" -- we have customers like Nike and Proctor & Gamble, who are very brand conscious, we provide the source code for the presentation layer of the application and they can do as much customisation as they want. "They say you can't tolerate the vendor upgrading it whenever they want," -- well four years ago we built an application called HMS – hosted management system – where we are the only on-demand vendor which allows their clients to determine when they get upgrades and whether they take upgrades at all. In a 24x7 call centre you can't use a Frankenstein switch at the headquarters to do all the upgrades all at once.
Gartner claims your technology is about two years ahead of the likes of Salesforce.com – what do you put this down to?
Unlike a sales application, our application is customer-facing – not to our customers but our customers' customers. So we have had to worry about and solve hosting problems that everyone else in the on-demand space has not had to even think about yet. In Q2 we served 110 million consumers, in Q3 we served 140 million, so on annual basis it's almost 600 million consumer interactions. You think about the scalability needed to do this and interestingly we are doing almost all of it on open source. We run on Linux, we run on MySQL – we could easily be the largest MySQL installation in the world in terms of transactions, or billions of queries a month.
What's your feeling about open-source CRM systems – the likes of SugarCRM for instance?
Success at CRM is 30 percent technology and 70 percent people and process issues. We have a model where we engage with our clients to understand their business requirements and then help them redesign the workflow in their business to get value out of the solutions – technology does not do that by itself. It's an interesting idea to get something for free but it's usually worth what you pay for it.
Novell's chief executive Jack Messman talks about this rising tide of commoditisation that is currently lapping around the OS layer but will eventually reach the business application level.
I am not so sure. We are a big supporter of open source. We get huge economies of scale from running Linux and a whole bunch of other things at the infrastructure layer. I agree that open source is commoditising the infrastructure layer but the value from CRM applications comes from the knowledge of the best practice not from technology itself. The technology is an enabler and it is necessary but it is not sufficient.
So is the eventual aim to make the business completely on-demand – is that the way you are pushing things?
When we go into a client we don't mention on-demand at all. What we talk about is call-centre efficiency, improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue, that is what we are selling and oh by the way, we deliver it in on-demand so it costs you a lot less. We sell a lot more on-demand solutions because we have an on-premises solution. Over 90 percent of our customers choose to host with us but we don't want to make that a religious argument at the start of the conversation.
