Third Idea Consulting

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned them before, but TIBCO (Tibco hereafter, because I hate capitalizing entire company names) is one of those wicked-smart companies that is moving social CRM forward in a usable, well thought out way for the enterprise. Tibco, and its tibbr product in particular, needs more exposure, because it has got a really solid grip on what businesses need to make social computing part of the work day.

Today marked the launch of tibbr 3.0, which Tibco is calling “the 21st century universal inbox for social computing in the enterprise.” Tibbr 3.0 will be generally available in August 2011; you can read the launch press release here, but I’m inclined to give my own thoughts about what’s on offer.

Videoconferencing. One of the components is tibcast, a video conference app with desktop video and voice. You might think this is no big deal, since there are several companies who have conference modules, and at least one or two who only do video conferencing. the difference is that tibcast is built right into your desktop work environment, and is completely ad-hoc. Nothing needs to be set up or agreed upon in advance; you can decide to have a conference on the fly with anybody you can reach, and just start the thing up. Anybody on the team who wasn’t available has full access to the recorded meeting, as well as any files that were shared.

Related to this is Tibbr Voice. When you dial into 1-800-TIBBR, the system recognizes your phone number (and thus your permissions) and allows you to post voice memos directly to your wall, or somebody else’s.

Document Management. Ram Menon, Tibco’s EVP of marketing, has been mentioning lately that next year, businesses will generate an estimated 1,500 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion GB) of files—some 33 trillion documents—in addition to all the other data they will produce. Each year, what Menon calls “Where’s the File Syndrome” grows worse, and is exacerbated by cases where static copies must be distributed.

Tibbr 3.0 integrates with any folder file system (the example given is Microsoft SharePoint), granting discovery and write-back capabilities while preserving all corporate permissions and security. You can’t accidentally share a forbidden document by dragging it to the wrong area of your desktop, but you can make it available to the right people as if they had their own copy while still preserving a single version of the truth.

Easing Social Sprawl. Anybody who deals with more than a few social networking tools knows what social sprawl is—our attentions are split between so many communities and different kinds of interaction that managing the feeds becomes its own full time job. Tibbr Communities provides a single work space for them all, with multiple walls and varying access rights—again, you can’t accidentally put sensitive data on the wrong wall. All the pieces of your social media pile are consolidated into one installation. Tibco is calling this an industry first.

Actionability in the Social Context. Seeing the activity of coworkers, partners, and customers, and being able to communicate about it quickly and easily, is a huge plus. But business operations need more than a news feed and some chat. Tibco draws on its SOA expertise to let users act on what they see in the feed without going to another applications. Tibbr 3.0 lets you do things like approve purchase orders, OK budget requests, or order more inventory without ever leaving your wall—the place where you found out about the needed actions.

Further drawing on SOA, Tibbr 3.0 introduces tibSmartwidgets (I don’t choose the names, I just report on ‘em), a way to embed tibbr 3.0 into any existing enterprise apps through context-sensitive widgets.

What it all means to me. From what I can see, tibbr 3.0 is bloody beautiful in concept and execution. I might never again work in a large corporation where all of these new and awesome technologies will be used, but I can imagine using something like tibbr if I did, and feeling like it was how things should always have been. Feeling faceless, powerless, out of the loop, disconnected—these are major concerns for modern workers, and the younger generations coming into the work force won’t stand for it.

A number of good point solutions and adaptations of consumer-level social technology already exist, and there is a growing movement to integrate them into a single social business environment. Tibco is doing a fantastic job of it with tibbr. This is full-bore SCRM here.

Tibco is a name well known to industry insiders, but it seems the company doesn’t get much attention beyond those circles. I think this is a mistake. Tibco is doing game-changing work, and I urge you to take a closer look. Even if you’re happy with what you’ve got, or are a competitor, make Tibco part of the conversation. A rising tide floats all boats.

Right after the opening keynote at CRM Evolution ‘09, Sage North America (as represented by Larry Ritter and Ryan Zuk) gave me the lowdown on the next iteration of the venerable ACT! contact manager/CRM system. The official announcement dropped via Pitch Engine today, complete with social media integration, so I figured I’d provide my thoughts on what Sage has got going on.

I always refer to ACT! as “venerable”; it has a much nicer sound than “old,” and conveys a certain degree of respect. The product has had its ups and downs since its birth 23 years ago, but it’s hard to argue with success. A software product line that survives 20 years is rare enough, but ACT! has managed to thrive. According to Larry Ritter (senior VP and GM of Sage CRM Solutions, in case you didn’t follow the link), 2008 saw a 12 percent revenue increase year-over-year for ACT!, which is impressive given the economy and the competition. As much as we like to say that CRM needs to be in every part of a business, the fact is that many companies (especially small ones, where ACT! has most of its customers) do very well with contact management, sales force automation, and some marketing tools—which is pretty much what ACT! provides.

ACT! By Sage 2010, the new version, presents itself as a big change from previous installments. The interface is different, very clean. It reminded me of SAP’s new user interface for SME.

The redesign isn’t merely cosmetic; Sage employed keystroke-level modeling to discover how users perform tasks and made its changes based on ease and efficiency. The results give Sage something to sell against: based on seven standard activities (see below), ACT! 2010 allows 25 percent higher productivity Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and 37 percent more than Salesforce.com—figures I’m sure both companies will refute or minimize if asked. Those tasks are:

• Find information about last meeting with a contact
• Create a new contact
• Search for all contacts in a specific area
• Schedule a call
• Record notes about a contact/customer meeting
• View your work week calendar
• Mark an activity complete and schedule follow-up

Still, if that’s all you really need from CRM or contact management, Sage makes a compelling argument for its product instead of Microsoft’s or Salesforce.com’s.

The other cool thing in ACT! 2010 is the social media integration—you knew I’d be getting to this sooner or later, right? ACT!’s Web Info tab will keep you posted on a contact’s social networking profiles and updates, links their Web site to the contact record, and lets you add data feeds to the record (Hoovers, Twitter, and ESPN are the examples given). Web searches from this tab pass information back and forth between ACT! and the activity, and it’s persistent, so you can do a Google search or get travel info without leaving the screen and update the record with what you find.

Marketing isn’t forgotten in this release. It ships with several email marketing campaign templates and a campaign designer. Drip marketing—a series of touches over time—and customer surveys are two of the functions Sage showed me. Everything is tracked and reported, of course, so hot leads with high open and forward rates can be piped directly to sales when appropriate so they can schedule a call or meeting.

In a nod to the changing face of the inbox, those meetings can be sent as iCal invitations—which work in Google Calendar as well as Microsoft Outlook. It’s a minor benefit (unless you don’t use Outlook) but it’s still very nice to have.

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So that’s the product. Let’s talk about the press release. If you follow the link provided above, you’ll see that the release has social connectivity built right in. There’s a short Twitter pitch in addition to the full-length announcement. Share buttons abound. There are links to fact sheets, images, videos, tags, related news … it almost makes me feel useless. When I discussed timing with the highly media-savvy Ryan Zuk, he indicated that there was little sense in setting an embargo date because all of the information was already in the hands of Sage partners and customers because of Sage’s blogs. Fluid, free exchange of information is a beautiful thing, huh?

I’m sure there will always be press blackouts, whether for legal reasons or just because a company wants to deliver a nice surprise. But information wants to be free, so I applaud Pitch Engine for a terrific delivery format—and Sage for making use of it.