24 Quotes by Rob Bois

Some customers have the expectation that you flip a switch and you're done. But there are setup costs and training costs and ramp-up costs. There's getting the system customized to match the business context and then getting people to use the system. CRM implementations are still complex, even if they're delivered in an on-demand fashion.

Revenue has become a top priority, and companies have to get something in place quickly to meet that need. Hosted has become very appealing to get up and running quickly with CRM -- without involving I.T. budgets.

But each company has varying degrees of adherence to Web-services standards and varying methods of supporting those systems.

Today, it doesn't match the full breadth of other on-demand CRM offerings, but they're headed in that direction.

It isn't a scalability issue. Typically when you're talking about an organization that will have more than a thousand CRM users, you're talking about a broad implementation that will touch more areas of the company and will involve more business processes.

Larger companies are now seeing hosted CRM as a way to put the application in a single department to try it out, and then roll it out to the rest of the enterprise later.

Onyx says they have a poison pill in place, though I haven't seen it yet. It seems like an extreme method, but it could happen.

We knew that the small and midsize business segment would be a large part of this market, but we were a little surprised at how many large enterprises were eager to evaluate the software-as-service option.

There are several drivers in this market. One surprise has been larger enterprises that want CRM for a branch office or a department. Also, there are so many big players in the market now that it's been creating interest in hosted services.