Robert P. Desisto
VP Distinguished Analyst
14 years at Gartner
24 years IT industry
Robert Desisto is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research. He is responsible for managing the software as a service (SaaS) research agenda. His research focuses primarily on the use of SaaS as a delivery model for applications. Read Full Bio
by Robert Desisto | September 16, 2011 | Comments Off
It was assumed that the CRM SaaS market would be a zero sum game. Success of Microsoft would come at the expense of market share leader salesforce.com. However, there is evidence to the contrary. Two specific market events directly go against the prevailing wisdom that Microsoft’s gain would be Salesforce.com’s loss, or vice versa. Salesforce.com recently announced record numbers of new customers in their most recent quarter, while at the same time Microsoft let their CRM SaaS price promotion ($34 per user per month from normal list $44 per user per month) expire in North America. Microsoft will still pay an existing Oracle or salesforce.com customer $150 per user (up to 500 users) to switch to Microsoft and continues to offer the price reduction in non-North American regions of the world. The fact that Microsoft feels confident enough to let this promotion expire matches with increased inbound inquiry demand I have fielded on customers considering Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
This means rather than eating away at the SaaS pie, Microsoft has brought customers who were previously on the sidelines to the CRM SaaS table. This is not to say each vendor has not taken away business or existing customers from the other but goes more to the point that SaaS CRM particularly for sales shows no signs of slowing down. It is two early to draw longer term conclusions at this point, because ultimately the market will reach a level of saturation, but in the mean time it looks like the CRM SaaS market pie will need a bigger oven.
Category: Cloud CRM SaaS salesforce automation Software as a Service Tags: microsoft, oracle, SaaS; Cloud Computing;, salesforce.com
by Robert Desisto | September 8, 2011 | Comments Off
Spurned on by recent press hype, I have been inundated with calls from clients about a supposedly new concept called SaaS Enterprise License Agreements. Despite claims made by some vendors this is not a new concept, even for vendors who are making claims that it is new have been offering it for years. Sometimes vendors may vary terminology to dress up the ELA term but in the end the concept itself has not changed, nor the potential pitfalls that exist with them.
Many companies will end up paying premium for projected user amounts because they were convinced by the vendor that some day they may hypothetically increase their usage five fold. Further, most ELAs are typically only applicable for the initial term of the contract with other hidden goodies such as “not to exceed” user ceilings.
I have seen many companies in the past three years sign ELAs (or whatever term a vendor decides to call it) only to realized they grossly overpaid their usage. Customers are surprised to find out during contract renewal that to get out of the ELA they have to pay a price increase on seats they are actually using.
I am not suggesting ELA could not work in the favor of a customer but unless you have a very accurate count of user growth rates, you are simply buying into an option you do not need. You would be much better off negotiating a tiered pricing structure in the contract that can executed as user demand grows.
Category: Cloud CRM SaaS Software as a Service Vendor Contracts Tags: Enterprise License Agreements, microsoft, Netsuite, oracle, SaaS; Cloud Computing;, salesforce.com, Successfactors, Workday
by Robert Desisto | August 18, 2011 | Comments Off
I just published research on how to measure a vendor’s SaaS delivery capability. It covers topics ranging from a vendor’s operational management capabilities to measuring the the strength of a vendor’s service level agreement. No matter what SaaS application your considering (e.g., email, CRM, ERP, etc) this research note How to Evaluate A Vendor’s SaaS Deliver provides a checklist for companies to measure a vendor’s commitment to software as a service.
Category: Cloud CRM ERP SaaS salesforce automation Software as a Service Tags: CRM, SaaS; Cloud Computing;, software as a service
by Robert Desisto | July 22, 2011 | 2 Comments
Gartner’s Pace Layer Model can help sales organizations develop an effective, flexible and innovative sales application strategy. I just recently published a research paper on using the Pace Layer model to deconstruct a sales application portfolio. I provide specific examples for both sales organizations with direct and indirect sales channel models. The goal of the research is to help sales organization develop a long-term, sales technology plan. Worth the look.
Category: CRM salesforce automation Tags: pace layering, sales applications, salesforce automation
by Robert Desisto | July 18, 2011 | Comments Off
Check out the 2011 Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant (released on July 15th, 2011). Mobility continues to grow in importance for users; therefore, it has also become a more critical component of our evaluation criteria for the sales force automation (SFA) Magic Quadrant. Smartphones and iPads (see “iPads: Customer-Facing Selling Will Drive iPad Use for Sales” and “iPads: Their Impact on the Top Six Sales Processes”) are becoming preferred devices for the mobile salesperson. Software as a service (SaaS) also continues to play a more dominate role in the SFA Magic Quadrant, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Zoho added for 2011. Based on Gartner inquires during the past 12 months, new SFA evaluations are up by 30%. The primary objective for most sales organizations remains opportunity management, but we have also seen greater emphasis placed on sales effectiveness and sales-performance-related applications. We outline strengths and cautions for all of the SFA vendors in the quadrant.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM Software as a Service Tags: Cloud, CRM, microsoft, Netsuite, oracle, Pivotal, SaaS, Sage software, Sales force automation, sales people, salesforce.com, SAP, sugarcrm, Zoho
by Robert Desisto | April 21, 2011 | 4 Comments
While some may write that companies should have gotten better Service Level Agreements with Amazon, I ask does it really matter with such a long outage? Can a SLA really repair damage to your business? Just imagine having your customer contact center in the cloud being down for 20 hours. I am sure your customers would gain comfort knowing your company has a good SLA. I am not here to say Amazon’s outage will cause the death of cloud computing, but to explain away the obvious with long written explanations of zones, regions, etc, is good information of what happened but avoids the obvious issue. We need to show pause rushing to the cloud especially the more mission critical the application is to the business.
One CEO posted the following on their web site to their customers today:
We are unfortunately still down. This is beyond frustrating for us as well… as you can imagine. This has been a widespread, day-long outage that you may have seen reported in the media. Amazon Web Services has been experiencing major issues with failures on multiple levels.
These issues have taken down thousands of major sites with it. This outage has affected us as well as a number of other related sites.
We have a new server up that is restored from our backups, but it would mean losing almost an entire day’s worth of data. Our hope is that we can wait a bit longer for Amazon to get its act together and be humming back along with zero data loss. Worst case scenario at this point is sometime tonight or early AM we make the call to go back to the backups and things will be back to normal (minus yesterday’s data, which would need to be re-input)
We are very sorry for the problems and wish there was more we could do.
The lesson for today is not about Amazon although there are important tactical considerations we have learned. What is more important is to understand cloud outages do and will happen in the future. We have published a number of good research notes on mitigating risk but there is no way to completely avoid risk. However, taking pause and evaluating which applications you are willing to move to the cloud knowing there will be unmitigated risks is something we should all take greater care in doing.
Category: Cloud Software as a Service Uncategorized Tags: SaaS, SaaS; Cloud Computing;
by Robert Desisto | March 25, 2011 | Comments Off
We just published the SaaS Research Agenda key issues for 2011. Our focus is to not only help companies avoid pitfalls associated with cloud computing but provide best practices to gain optimal value. Check it out on Gartner.com.
Category: Cloud SaaS Software as a Service Tags: SaaS; Cloud Computing;
by Robert Desisto | March 24, 2011 | Comments Off
Just published an update to the Gartner Decision Framework for Evaluating Salesforce Automation functionality. The framework provides a complete view and suitability analysis of functionality for sales force automation ranging for opportunity management to social CRM.
Category: CRM Tags: CRM, Sales force automation
by Robert Desisto | March 21, 2011 | Comments Off
Lately, I keep hearing from sales force automation technology providers that salespeople who use their system “Love it”. Love?, Really?. The only reaction I ever get from a real sales person is that they enter as little data as possible into a sales force automation system to avoid being spied on. I am hoping this post gets responses from sales people who actually love their sales force automation system. Only requirement for your reply is to tell us why? Not just that you like your sales force automation system. I am expecting zero responses. Lets see if I am right.
Category: CRM Tags: Sales force automation, sales people
by Robert Desisto | March 7, 2011 | 4 Comments
On 1 March 2011, SAP previewed its updated Sales OnDemand solution at CeBIT 2011 in Hanover, Germany. Neither pricing nor an official release date has been determined, but the product will be available for early customer involvement in April 2011. The new offering reflects a trend toward social technology in CRM applications with a people-centric approach, but market success will hinge on its reliability, cost and integration.
See my First Take on Gartner.com, Price, Integration and Reliability Will Decide Sales OnDemand’s Success, for further analysis.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM ERP SaaS Software as a Service Tags: CRM, SaaS; Cloud Computing;, Sales force automation, SAP
