Author: David

I’ve been writing about sustainability as a natural outgrowth of CRM for a couple of years now. I know it takes time to refine a message—and, since the message of sustainability represents a major market turn, it has to be done right. But there’s been scant progress thus far, and certainly not enough.  

By “sustainability” I mean using CRM to help organizations reduce the cost of business processes and increase revenues along three specific dimensions:

Cloud computing has produced many benefits to the small and medium-sized business, one of the most powerful being the ease of mobility. Using cloud computing, businesses can now allow their employees to work anywhere from any device allowing them greater productivity, flexibility, and an overall competitive advantage.

Increased Productivity

VMware’s channel chief said solution providers looking to get in early on cloud computing can do so relatively painlessly in a five-step process, and that his company will introduce new competencies to help them on the way.

There is still plenty of time for solution providers to take advantage of the movement towards cloud computing and to make good money doing so, said Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of worldwide field operations.

"We do not believe solution providers should be afraid of the cloud," Eschenbach said. "There’s a lot of money to be made."

They say good things come to those who wait — and wait is what attendees did on Sunday evening here at the start of this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. Eventually, however, Larry Ellison, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer, introduced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a "cloud in a box," that brings together Oracle hardware and software at an extremely fast performance rate.

[Editors’ Note: CRM‘s compendium of relevant links and coverage from Oracle OpenWorld 2010 can be found here.]

Sometimes a team needs one of its members to get the ball rolling. For Prudential Financial, a Fortune 500 company with a presence in 30 countries, that member was its 401(k) retirement division. Dissatisfied with its CRM system and its process for tracking leads, the United States division of Prudential’s retirement business sought out Salesforce.com in spring 2009 to breathe new life into a lethargic customer-retention program and to integrate the sales team from a recent acquisition. That one business unit got the ball rolling, all right—a year later, all of Prudential’s U.S. business units had signed on with Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff tried to take the high road after Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison earlier this week bashed his company as a cloud computing pretender. But unfortunately, the high road was apparently closed.

RightScale, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cloud management software maker, has raised $25 million in new funds from Tenaya Capital, joined by DAG Ventures and other current investors: Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures. This is RightScale’s third round of funding, bringing the total funds raised to $42.5 million.

IT managers and budget decision-makers who took part in a survey said that, on average, 10.2 percent of spending on external IT services in 2010 will have gone to external cloud service providers, said Gartner in a statement on Wednesday. More than 1,500 people were interviewed for the survey.