The Greenberg CRM Watch List Continues: Diversity
“Different strokes for all kinds of folks” is the lead in to this new installment of Paul Greenberg's CRM Watchlist. Citing projects by IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Infor, Relayware, Gist and others, Greenberg calls this group interesting
because of diversity.
“I found it curious a few month ago, when I got a PR email that said that IBM was getting into “Social CRM.” I attempted to noodle on this without the benefit of any further knowledge than I had and came up with some facts and some speculation. The facts were, IBM had this product called, Lotus Connections (now at version 3.0) that was focused primarily on enterprise collaboration. Fact#2 – IBM had purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion in 2009 for SPSS's mad skills when it came to predictive analytics which could include some customer analytics. Fact #3 -IBM had acquired Unica in mid 2010, one of the leaders in marketing automation of years past – and one of the first, BTW, to actually provide a usable non-math major only UI for a marketing automation product – this, of course, goes back a few years.
“Hmmm. None of the facts added up to “Social CRM” exactly unless you linearly combined Lotus Connections (Social) and Unica (CRM) and came up with it that way. Nope. That made no sense as a support to the claim.”
Read the Full Story at Social CRM: The Conversation
