Points to ponder before making a decision on CRM On Premise or CRM On Demand application

1. CRM On-Demand or On Premise
Demand On-Premise
Points to Ponder before making a final decision on product finalization

2. Contents
Introduction:...........................................................................................................................................................3
CRM On Demand or On Premise: ...........................................................................................................................4
Available Products & Discussion based on standard Reports: ...............................................................................8
Conclusion: .............................................................................................................................................................8

3. Introduction:
The latest enterprise software forecast from Gartner shows Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
increasing to a $36.5B worldwide market by 2017, a significant increase from the $20.6B forecasted in Q1 of this
year. CRM also leads all enterprise software categories in projected growth, showing a 15.1% CAGR from 2012
to 2017, also revised up from 9.7% in the Q1 forecast.
With the advancement of Internet & Mobile Technologies and demanding customer satisfaction CRM plays a
vital role for business evolvement.
CRM is directly coupled with the Business strategy, process mapping and their relationship with different
department across your organization either marketing, sales, service etc.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management should not only be considered as an IT (Information Technology)
software application but should be handled as a product which determines your business strategy.
With the upcoming 4th Generation mobile technologies knocking at our door, shouldn’t we plan ourselves for
making a best move for a low cost and self sufficient means to interact with our customers?
To quote Gartner “The CRM customer engagement center (CEC) refers to a logical set of technologies and
business applications that are engineered to provide customer service and support, regardless of the interaction
(or engagement) channel. The goal of the CEC is not only to provide service to customers as they move among
communications channels — including social media — while retaining the customers' context, but also to deliver
the appropriate business rule to determine the next best action, information or process with which to engage the
customers.” (Ref: Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center).
There are many CRM products available in the markets which have evolved through continuous business process
studies. During this walkthrough I will avoid to comment on any product or strategy as available in the market
for a user and organization for CRM implementation.
Frankly speaking, USP or unique selling point of a CRM product is determined by the customer requirements and
the sales person ability to sell the product to the customer.
By 2015, organizations that have not embraced the concept of the customer engagement center will lose
customers to competitors that have. (Ref: Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center).
As a business leader involved with IT implementation I would like to share some important criteria’s which each
organization should pay heed to before making a final decision.

4. CRM On Demand or On Premise
Premise:
In order to take a decision one needs to discuss the below criteria:
BUSINESS VISION:
CRM on Premise requires a lot of CAPEX whereas the CRM on Demand works well with the OPEX business
model. User can pay to the vendor based on the data usage, business processes, modules implemented and
,
the application users.
Current Business Size, Number of concurrent application users, Forecasted Business Growth, planned IT
Budget, project delivery timelines, the Risk bearing capacity are few other factors which plays a major role
,
to short list the product.
IT ENVIRONMENT:
The proposed CRM application should fit well to the business d
domain and should support the current and
future IT environment.
Organizational IT leaders should plan the CRM product management strategy. They should finalize the
development to deployment methodology. The CRM on Demand has a dependency on the product vendor
v
for its product deployment and support. The overall control of the organization is lost in case of outsourcing
a product to vendor. This methodology is advantageous for an organization who does want to have a small
internal IT team.
On Premise application will require users to finalize the IT hardware sizing and deployment techniques.
The various points to consider during deployment will depend upon the Network, CPU, Memory and Caching
etc.
VENDOR PRODUCT STRATEGY :
There are various CRM product vendors in the market but one should keep a close eye on the vendor
us
reputation, the business strategy, vision for the product growth, product support and vendor domain
knowledge.

5. PRODUCT READINESS:
Domain specific COTS/ Off the Self product should be preferred. More product customization should be
avoided.
It is favored to select a product which can be configured and customized as per the business requirement.
The ability to tailor an application with low
low-cost configuration (both when initially deployed and later as
business requirements and processes change) is highly desirable and preferable to tailoring by customization
using programming.
IMPLEMENTATION RISK :
The major project risk can be identified as:
as:-
“55% of traditional CRM projects are a failure and 42% of licenses purchased are shelfware” - Gartner
As per a study, On Demand applications have fewer chances of failures.
PROJECT ROI:
Understanding ROI will help to make decisions with positive financial benefits and keep business moving
financial
forward. The basic ROI calculation is to divide the net return from an investment, by the cost of the
investment and express this as a percentage
percentage.

6. In case of On Demand project the projects can be implemented at a less initial investment and with more
benefits. Even the delivery time can be lessened and may achieve a break even in less time.
GO LIVE SUPPORT:
Organization implementing CRM should consider the Technology used for product development, solution
build, data migration strategies, post Go Live support associated with the product. Help & support available
for product deployment and bug fixing
PRODUCT FEATURES:
A CRM product should support below modules. These may vary based on the domain, industry for which the
hould
product needs to be implemented.

7. The various other features which may help to shortlist a product are:
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Application usability and flexibility provided to the internal users and if possible for external customer.
It’s good to have a multi-channel application support for self-service, particularly for the sales and
customer service functions.
Look for applications that are easy-to-maintain. Ease of maintenance has both cost implications and IT
resource implications.
Offline database availability and synchronization to the main database.
Product usability on the smartphones, PDAs, laptops and as an mobile APPs
Load balancing facility, servers clustering
Email, SMS, IVR integration facility
User friendly search. Build in contextual search. Search in internal as well as external application from
the product
The Document storage and retrieval application to be integrated
Data retrieval, update by using Excel or notepad as most of the business user use Excel or Notepad to
track their data and this needs to be uploaded on a periodic basis.
Data Merge and De Duplication facility. Huge volumes of data load and retrieval with data cleansing
features.
Audit Trail or check for any updates. This helps to provide a data security.
Live chat with customer integrated within application.
Integration with Banking/ payment gateway
Roles and responsibility based application for data viewing.
Friendly user interface where the users can change the color and font as per the need
Multiple language as well as currency support
Bi-directional Contact, Appointment, Task Synchronization fro outlook/ Email applications
Support for secure communication protocols (SSL, IPSec)- Robust security infrastructure with support for
industry standard encryption
Enterprise-level management capabilities - Robust error logging and user management
Stage wise deployment of the product based on the customer need and enhancement and up gradation
facility
Look for light-weight, flexible, and tiered architectures.
Inbuild migration facility from current application with data and business logic
The product should not face the restrictions due to data security. Some regulatory authority and country
rules does not allow the data and business logic to be shared. This happens in case of On Demand
application usually.
Disaster Recovery & Business continuity planning
Backup & Data archival plans
FUTURE BUSINESS STRATEGY:
Life cycle of CRM product consists of maximum of 3-4 years. A CRM product should be deployed which
allows easy product enhancements and should be easy for migration to another application.

8. Available Products & Discussion based on standard Reports:
Gartner positions different product in the Magic Quadrant based on the product‘s ability to execute and the
completeness of vision. The Niche players fit into specific domain.
Conclusion:
It should be a complete business leadership decision while implementing a CRM product in their industry. It
should be backed by vision and technical expertise.
CRM implementation should act as a Change agent and should help the organization to grow at an exponential
rate with 360 degrees customers’ service.
It’s difficult to attain new customers but easy to retain existing customers!