Sophisticated Customer Relationship Collaboration with MindTouch & SnapLogic
In another sign of the continuing maturity of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, open source social enterprise collaboration vendor MindTouch and open source data integration framework company SnapLogic announce a new partnership today.
SnapLogic have a terrific reputation in the open source data integration world, linking (with 'pipelines') the RESTful foundational building blocks that enable enterprise scale connections between 'software as a service' (saas) applications.
MindTouch have grown historically from being an enterprise wiki provider. 'Deki Wiki' was their original product which was completely rewritten last year to make their wiki solution a facet of a powerful enterprise web services engine.
Today's announcement enables powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) support through MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server with SnapLogic Solution Packs for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. MindTouch claim this approach will work with virtually any CRM system.
In plain English this enables greater team intelligence sharing around an enterprise's CRM system though MindTouch's collaborative interface. The above video demonstrates powerful use case, and illustrates the rapidly increasing power and credibility the SaaS space brings to the enterprise as I alluded to in yesterdays post.
CRM is at the heart of revenue generation and therefore at the sharp end of any business: enhancing the value of leading customer intelligence applications through increased contextual collaboration is a hugely attractive proposition for anyone interested in maximizing the effectiveness of their customer intelligence, which lives as much in employees heads as in a CRM system.
By facilitating the power of collaboration around the data in the CRM, MindTouch effectively supercharge an already powerful asset.
This type of development, with reasonably low adoption cost and relatively rocket science free deployment complexity, allows an enterprise to get up and running quickly - and mining their prospect's data with maximum efficiency.
A drawback of open source stack update planning can be dependence on engineers who have created arcane connections between applications: only they know where the crumbly mortar between the bricks is, and what has been cobbled together and compromised to keep the systems running.
SnapLogic claim to have brought 'Really Simple Integration to the enterprise'. for IT professionals this translates to fewer headaches with intransigent engineers ignoring needed changes to technology because they have painted themselves into a technological corner.
The more modular SaaS service becomes, and the easier it is to snap together the components, the greater the dual impact of powerful solutions and cost efficiencies will be.
This powerful open source alliance to provide enterprise class CRM and associated collaboration is a terrific example of this.