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Wednesday 25 March 2009

Leveraging core CRM with mashups

Interesting comments from Michael Maoz at Gartner who points out that for many organizations there isn’t much choice in their core CRM provider, and that this isn’t going to change any time soon…
…. We are going to see a lot more business settling on one core platform vendor, and then wrapping around that vendor offering the best of breed components that fit into a service-orientated ecosystem. Much of that ecosystem will be Cloud-based, and many of the participants will be short-lived companies and applications, but they might just be your shortcut to market advantage.
It seems to me that this type of “wrapping” is being increasingly sought as customer service organizations are (1) struggling to drive out the efficiencies demanded by the current business climate by innovating with their existing applications and (2) figuring out how to capitalize on the opportunities from “CRM2.0”

However, depending on the path taken to incorporate that extra functionality, it might not be easy. During our 5+ years of dealing with customer service and support organizations, we’ve seen that companies often implement a core CRM platform but then hit a dead end when they try to drive efficiencies and adapt to new ways of working. Customizing and extending CRM applications can be difficult, risky, and expensive.
 
This is where enterprise mashups come into play, providing a low risk and innovative way to wrap components around a core platform.  At Corizon we call it “integration without customization” a lightweight and rapid way to extend major applications such as Siebel or SAP to streamline core processes.  The result is just the sort of service oriented approach that Michael calls for, allowing organizations to cope with participants being short lived, as organizations and the market experiment and evolve.  
 
As organizations seek to make existing processes more efficient, enterprise mashups are taking off. Where customization created new dependencies, mashups are creating new freedoms: the freedom to modify complex business processes, and the freedom to choose the best application for every task. Businesses might have a limited menu of CRM platforms to choose from, but they have unlimited choice in how they deploy and manage them. 

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