Five functions of CRM application to platform evaluation

In today's society, the cloud is used almost all the time, and articles on cloud computing, virtualization and the next-generation computing platform can be seen almost every day. There is no doubt that these computing patterns are so important to our lives, but what is the importance of cloud computing if it is specific to Customer relationship management (CRM)? How do we evaluate the platform for CRM applications?

As we all know, in CRM applications, the ability to easily change, extend, and integrate applications can be more important than any other feature. The real best CRM is not purchased, but built, and platform advantage is more important than feature list. So as long as the platform to become better, you can make CRM more reliable and durable. Conversely, if you have a good CRM application, the platform will become more secure with application support.

When evaluating a platform, what aspects of the platform are really important for CRM applications?

• The prevalence of application programming interfaces (APIs), languages, and libraries

A platform with millions of developers is much more important than another platform with only a small group of loyal developers. Who remembers the ABAP programming language? If you can't build an efficient development team around Ruby on rails, it doesn't matter how beautiful the platform is. It is the platform of VB.net, Java, PHP, Perl, and Python that is favored by a pragmatic approach to focus on the developer community rather than the underlying technology.

• Number and use of accessories, tools and development Aids

It is really important that many libraries have not been censored by a large group of users, possibly open source users. Do they handle UTF-32 characters in the right way? Libraries that can handle such characters properly are often not too many. You also need to focus on the integrated development Environment (IDE) Plug-ins and extensions (Eclipse or NetBeans), test kit (testing harness), and build environment.

• The platform is a thoughtful, performance-stable integration approach? Or a bunch of bluffing marketing?

Over the years, I've often exhorted developers: don't believe it. There are two reasons to use the Cloud platform: one is easy to develop and the other is easy to integrate with other wide application programs. You should focus on the API consistency and scope of application. Can you get all the important objects in the CRM system? is the API spread across 17 dynamic link libraries? Or are they a set of logical Web services? Can I use all the APIs for any subsystem? Or is the platform separated? Can the application begin to perform CRM transactions or workflows from outside the platform? Can external systems fully participate in the triggers and workflows of CRM applications?

• Scalability of the actual environment

How many hours a month does the outage occur? How about response time during busy hours? Does the platform have resource control restrictions? Or just to make it easier for CRM vendors to use rigid code structures? Or is there a simple and intuitive way to handle 10,000 or 100,000 records at a draught? You will be surprised to find that there are too many limitations in the CRM API for scalability.

• A fine-grained security model implemented for all API operations

You need to consider the three levels of the security model: C/R/U/D permissions on the underlying database, application-level roles, objects, and operations, and Web service methods.

As shown above, the devil is in the details. This is because, for example, it may be possible to obtain APIs based on a very popular language, but CRM vendors can add proprietary extensions, resulting in a larger development community, and may have a flawless API, but only for the data stored in the CRM application database.

So to really know if your CRM platform is reliable and flexible enough for you, a viable approach is to launch a pilot project with a practical application. Of course, this may cost a lot, but it's a good deal compared to the larger cost of choosing the wrong platform.

Recently, the outgoing VMware and saleforce.com together to publish Vmforce platform. Vmware-salesforce platform can make each side of the product to a higher level? It certainly has this potential. For VMware, this has contributed significantly to its development community and a very popular set of business objects and application features. Salesforce not only expands the Java development Community, it also improves its virtualization computing technology and expands its platform with an extensible common cloud stack. Although Vmforce is not a direct target for Microsoft's Azure platform, it provides an important competitive platform for CIOs to develop a range of business applications in the cloud environment.