Why On-premise CRM Deployments Need Cloud Computing

Many on-premise CRM vendors like Sage Saleslogix are now offering a cloud option.   Companies who want an in-house solution usually ignore these options. Here are a couple of reasons why you should consider a cloud offering.

Testing -- to effectively manage your CRM system you need a test system, if not a test and development system.  These systems require software licenses for operating systems, data bases, and system utilities.  They require back, management time and IT support time.  Cloud computing provides a lower cost alternative to managing your CRM test / development system because you rent the cloud environment only when you need it.    Places like Amazon charge a few dollars per hour for these systems.  Companies can have a managed test environment which they only need to turn on when they are testing and have accessibility from anywhere.  The cloud can do all this while keeping costs down. 

Disaster Recovery --  Cloud computing provides an option for company who are looking for a disaster planning.  A company can set up and maintain a complete environment for about $250 and maintain it for a monthly fee of about $50.  Back up services can push a copy of your CRM data to Amazon for a few dollars a month or when disaster strikes you can migrate up a back-up copy of you data base.  Assuming you make back-ups.  Cloud-computing is a virtual environment,  so you can ramp you the processor, memory and disk space on the fly to meet the needs of your production environment.

So on-premise user before dismissing cloud computing you might want to reconsider how you are doing Disaster Recovery and development / testing and see if these provide money saving alternatives.

Video games have it right. They start you out learning some basic skills and expand on those slowly based upon your accomplishments. In other words you can't kill the monster until you can hop from rock to rock. You don't learn how to hop from rock to rock until you can use a sword. 

I watch kids learn how to master the game by a series of small steps in days and weeks until they are experts.  This should be our model for CRM adoption.

Consider some facts:

•            Adults retain two hours of an eight hour training class

•           Most companies try to roll out all features in their initial rollout to save money

•           Forty percent of CRM projects fail because of lack of user adoption

Maybe the answer is that we should slow down our rollout plans and follow the video game model.

The implication of this approach might not be transparent for existing implementations, it means that a new CRM implementation has no additional features than before. New users to CRM should expect a "less is more" approach to deployment with multiple phases being deployed only after the predecessor phase was successfully completed. In video game terms, you have completed the level. 

Because CRM is not an individual sport we need to evaluate the entire team to determine success before we move to the next phase.  This requires us to develop a testing / adoption process that evaluates a crm team before rollout of the next set of features, or in video game terms, proceed to the next level.

Taming, or killing the crm monster is about achieving enough skill slowly to get to the next level.  If you do that enough times you can win the game. < >< ><-->