It wasn’t the quietest place for an on-camera interview, but the video offers a 2-minute introduction to the Bridge-x “Customer 360″ solution.

The video, starting at 2:35, also contains footage of an interview with one of our customers talking about their experience with using “Sales 360″.

This is a business with high barriers to entry. Almost every player on those charts has been around for at least a decade. Yet, it feels as if there’s a big shift waiting for the industry as a whole; a major upheaval that will make the old enterprise software business look old and outdated.

“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.

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!

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.

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).

“…a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet.”

Think about it - the software allows you to create a montage (i.e. a “visual composite”) by simply tagging the various elements of a freehand sketch!

You can read the abstract and get more details on this amazing piece of technology. (Link via Metafilter)

Now, why isn’t enterprise IT this easy?

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?

“….selling software as a continuously updated service, on a pay-as-you-go subscription, seems like an anomaly. But the accepted status quo is in fact merely a quirk of history, brought about by government action.“

(Emphasis mine)

I wasn’t aware of this fact at all. If you work in the packaged software business or in the implementation business, you should read the full post. You should also check out Vinnie’s post on this topic.

In our business, we too are experiencing something similar. It may not yet be as noticeable as in the case of some SaaS providers, but it is undoubtedly felt by all of us.

We develop solutions on top of SAP’s Netweaver platform but we do not implement any of the back-end products from SAP (such as ECC or CRM or SRM). So in that sense, we are not a packaged software provider nor are we - strictly speaking - in the implementation business. But customers expect our solutions to deliver features and functionality, just as they would from a software product vendor.

Interesting times, to be in the enterprise software business right now.