PracticalSOA

Music to our ears:

“Other partners, like one of my all time SAP favorites, Bridge-X demoed their wares. In the case of Bridge-X it was Sales360 which as they emphasize “moves information, not data.” What that means is that can capture and analyze multiple sources using pointers basically. The pointers show where the data is and allow it to be analyzed and aggregated on a dashboard. They do a great job as they did for Lincoln Electric(demonstrated by John Goetz of Lincoln E.) and other customers.”

That feedback (scroll down below the section titled “CRM 7.0, Messaging and Mobile”), coming from a CRM thought leader, made our entire team very, very happy today.

Are you attending the SAP Insider CRM 2010 conference in Orlando this week?

It is an especially satisfying moment for all of us here at Bridge-x Technologies to be at the event. Some of our customers will be in attendance at the conference and they all have very nice things to say about our solutions and what they mean to their business!

“Rooftop Marketplace” may be an unusual name for an enterprise tool (it’s only a prototype at the moment) but the demo is worth a look. (Link to SAP’s SDN forum; via SAP Web 2.0)

The promise of applications like Rooftop Marketplace is powerful: the ability to string together a collection of widgets, thus letting users (or IT) create a full application workflow.

But to me, the more interesting challenge lies in figuring out the “use case” for such tools. “Application workflow” is an abstract notion. Users don’t think in those terms, of course. However, “Purchase order approval” is a real business scenario. So the implication of having tools like “Rooftop Marketplace” (or indeed any composite application builder) is that IT must help define both the problem and the desired solution differently than they do today.

(With apologies to Mr. Letterman, of course)

10. Salespeople must log into CRM, ERP and a data warehouse system to find all the information they need about an account or a prospect.
9. Salespeople spend hours gathering account information instead of selling.
8. Salespeople have no real basis for their revenue or volume forecasts, other than “gut feel”.
7. Your Sales VP has no easy way to monitor key sales metrics on a daily basis.
6. Salespeople spend half a day collecting their sales territory data for the status Call with the Regional Sales Manager on Friday.
5. Regional Sales managers spend all day Friday collecting sales reports for the Monday morning status call with the VP.
4. Sales VP spends all Monday collecting sales reports for the status call with the company’s President.
3. Sales expenses and sales activities cannot be correlated.
2. The supply planning team complains of lack of verifiable demand forecast.

And the #1 sign that your business needs a 360-degree view of sales:

1. Salespeople do not clearly see the link between their actions (sales efforts) and results (variable compensation).

SAP gets its own category on Alltop. (It’s probably been there for a while, but I noticed it only today.)

The good news? We will be immortal in 20 years. (Link to CNET)

The bad news? Think of how much you will be paying toward those pesky annual maintenance fees to software vendors.

Still want to live forever?