The Challenge

Having been a user of a leading CRM tool for nearly ten years, blue-infinity had faced some doubts about its adoption due to questions of flexibility, ergonomics and integration. In addition to this CRM tool, blue-infinity uses a large number of specialist applications that provide support for collaboration, document management, knowledge management and blogging. This vast array of tools, often developed internally and updated and improved continuously, poses a well known challenge: integration.

Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of this article is not to lecture on CRM and repeat for the umpteenth time that CRM is “a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy”. The idea of this article is rather to show what should have been obvious all along; that CRM is the central element of B2C, just as the Active Directory is the central repository used for authentication and authorization in an organization.

Yet a vast majority of companies continue to develop B2C systems by systematically integrating a consumer profile – e-commerce, newsletter subscriptions, promotional marketing, community site – we cannot count the number of systems with a consumer profile, and worse yet the number of redundant systems within an organization.

And why is this? Certainly its due to a lack of strategy in the vision of B2C activities, managing each initiative in business units and redeveloping a referential consumer for its own needs!

Of course we’ve seen projects centrally defining a customized consumer database. But the level of functionality and above all the integration models were so poor that it resulted in very expensive and inflexible solutions.

In review, what is true for ERP is also for CRM; do not reinvent CRM, just integrate it.

Here, one of the key players involved in this sector comes into play. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a broadly established and standard solution addressing all the areas required to facilitate the activities of a marketing department or one to one communication. Out of the box, the product focuses mainly on Sales, Marketing and Support, furthermore the platform’s openness and customization allows for easy integration with all business systems as well as with external solutions supporting B2C activity.

At blue-infinity we have recently decided to integrate our e-marketing platform with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We proceeded step by step, as followed:

• Firstly, we integrated the enrollment process from our various marketing platforms. We thus defined the CRM as the system owning consumer data. Thanks to the CRM’s customization possibilities, we quickly adapted the contact profile to reflect the specific needs of our business, and finally integrated the external platforms through the web services provided by the solution
• In the second step, we defined marketing campaigns in the CRM that reflect all our Web initiatives, promotions, games, e-commerce etc. and through the web services we were able to upload all of the activities carried out by consumers on the B2C platforms

• In the third step, the sales from the e-commerce module were integrated the same way, and for each new command a workflow is triggered, giving orders to the company making the distribution.
• In the fourth step, thanks to the different integrations, we have completely reviewed our reporting strategy, so that it is found in the CRM and no longer at the level of each initiative

We have thus quickly integrated an unrivaled consumer management tool into our e-marketing platform, offering an overview of all consumer-centric B2C activities.

Sept. 24  2009 : Creation of Open Mashup Alliance

On September 24 2009, Major Mashup actors decided to promote interoperability and adoption of Entreprise Mashup Solution through the creation of the Open Mashup Alliance (www.openmashup.org). The Open Mashup Alliance will evolve and promote an open schema and language for mashups called Enterprise Markup Mashup Language (EMML). EMML has been developed specifically to facilitate the creation of mashup services and mashup applications.

What’s Mashup ? Songs of the blogs says that Mashup will be the technology where to be  in the  coming years, but can someone define what Enterprise Mashup is? if you drill down a bit it is a different way to aggregate  information for end users – but what is the difference? I hope these few lines will help you to better place this “buzzword” in the  IT world.

What’s a Mashup?

Wikipedia describes a mashup as “a Web site or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” In short terms we can compare it to portal and portlet.  But defining an enterprise mashup is another story. Connecting your ERP with your CRM and B2C data with one or multiple common denominator, all while maintaining single sign-on usage is not the same kind of problem as showing rss feeds and micro apps on your default web page.

SOA Magazine give the following definition of an enterprise mashup  “a user-centric combination of standards-based internal and external data sources”. Well what does it mean? To better understand remember the following key differentiators:

User-centric :  Mashups are for the end-users and often created by the users themselves. The recipient of a mashup is also another user like a co-worker, a partner, or a customer.

Standards-based internal and external data :  Mashups are predicated on the wave of standardized data and access formats that are washing over us including Web services and RSS.

Mashup can be compared with other common data integration tools. At first glance there are apparent overlaps with popular enterprise technologies like Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Information Integration (EII), and even the SOA Architect’s favorite tool, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). A mashup, is none of these things but complements all of them. All of these technologies have established value in the enterprise. Mashups support and extend them by aggregating and introducing the ability to create dynamic, user-centric solutions.

Major actors

Today’s main actors are Hinchcliffe & Company, Jackbe, Kapow Technologies, Xignite and Google with its app engine. My feeling is that the race is on, let’s see who will be the fastest  and the most hungry one.

References:

Jackbe whitepaper

SharePoint Conference: Building a SharePoint Designer Mashup