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Chapter 9 Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications 389

commercial enterprise application software, but are attractive to companies
such as small manufacturers because there are no software licensing charges
and fees are based on usage. For small and medium-sized businesses in select
countries, SAP now offers cloud-based versions of its Business One OnDemand
and Business ByDesign enterprise software solutions. Software as a service
(SaaS) and cloud-based versions of enterprise systems are starting to be offered
by smaller vendors such as NetSuite and Plex Online. The Interactive Session
on Technology describes some of the cloud-based systems for CRM. Over time,
more companies will be choosing to run all or part of their enterprise applica-
tions in the cloud on an as-needed basis.

Social CRM and Business Intelligence
CRM software vendors are enhancing their products to take advantage of social
networking technologies. These social enhancements help firms identify
new ideas more rapidly, improve team productivity, and deepen interactions
with customers. For example, Salesforce IdeaExchange enables subscribers to
harness the “wisdom of crowds” by allowing their customers to submit and
discuss new ideas. Dell Computer deployed this technology to encourage its
customers to suggest and vote on new concepts and feature changes in Dell
products. Chapter 2 described Salesforce Chatter, which enables users to create
Facebook-like profiles and receive real-time news feeds about co-workers, proj-
ects, and customers. Users can also form groups and post messages on each
other’s profiles to collaborate on projects.
Employees who interact with customers via social networking sites such
as Facebook and Twitter are often able to provide customer service functions
much faster and at lower cost than by using telephone conversations or e-mail.
Customers who are active social media users increasingly want—and expect—
businesses to respond to their questions and complaints through this channel.
Social CRM tools enable a business to connect customer conversations and
relationships from social networking sites to CRM processes. The leading CRM
vendors now offer such tools to link data from social networks into their CRM
software. Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM products are incorporating technol-
ogy to monitor, track, and analyze social media activity in Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, YouTube, and other sites.
Salesforce recently acquired social media monitoring company Radian6, which
helps companies such as Dell, GE, Kodak, and UPS monitor, analyze, and engage
in hundreds of millions of social media conversations. Salesforce has added these
capabilities to its software line. Oracle has enhanced its CRM products with
Buzzient, which provides tools for integrating social media with enterprise appli-
cations. The Buzzient platform automatically collects information from a huge
number of online sources in real time and analyzes the content based on users’
specifications. Buzzient supplies this information to CRM systems to help compa-
nies uncover sales leads and identify customer support issues.
Business Intelligence in Enterprise Applications Enterprise application
vendors have added business intelligence features to help managers obtain more
meaningful information from the massive amounts of data generated by these
systems. Included are tools for flexible reporting, ad hoc analysis, interactive
dashboards, what-if scenario analysis, and data visualization (see the Chapter
12 Interactive Session on Management). Rather than requiring users to leave
an application and launch separate reporting and analytics tools, the vendors
are starting to embed analytics within the context of the application itself. They
are also offering complementary stand-alone analytics products, such as SAP
Business Objects and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

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