It’s a CRM deployment jungle out there!
By Mike Richardson, Managing Director EMEA
The top performing Sales representative from one of our Business Partners in South Africa sent over a few of his holiday photos last week. Looks like he has been enjoying some time getting back to nature and maybe a bit too up close and personal with a massive bull elephant! To be honest, outdoors and camping are not my preference; if I’m on vacation, I need the location to be at least as comfortable as the home I have left behind, knowing that I’m relatively safe and ideally with better weather than the UK.
Personal preference is obviously very important in a holiday selection, especially with the few days we all tend to get during a hectic year, and the costs involved. Additionally, things change; I may have been perfectly happy camping in rain and mud as a University student in my twenties, but as I hit mid-fifties, that World Cruise I never believed I could relate to suddenly becomes appealing.
In business, as with holidays, personal preference and the ability to change your preferences are extremely significant when selecting a product or service. Here at Maximizer, we currently get asked by numerous prospects and customers about different deployment options: cloud versus on-premise and whether purchasing software versus renting it via a service agreement is more cost effective. Businesses need to be comfortable in the decisions they take about how to deploy their line of business solutions and where they keep their customer data; after all, this information is how they manage their business.
A finance sector institution with highly confidential data may prefer to have their data installed on their own servers, whether this be on-site or in a ‘private cloud’(where they rent a dedicated hosted server for their own use only). Some companies will even have a hybrid of these two models for contingency planning and redundancy. However, your average start-up company providing consultancy services may be perfectly happy sharing a hosted platform with other businesses when they get started. Initially, they don’t require the infrastructure, resource or cash to go with the on-premise option. However, as the start-up company grows, maybe a move to a dedicated server to run other applications in the same environment with a level of integration is needed.
Invariably, the deployment of a solution tends to get muddled with the purchase methodology: pay up front with an annual top-up for Software Assurance is the traditional on-premise payment route, while a monthly fee with a minimum contract term is the usual method for a shared server hosted or cloud-based offering. However, the payment and deployment models don’t need to be so rigid. As with holidays, at Maximizer we recognise that different clients have different requirements and these requirements can change over time.
Because of how the Maximizer solution has been developed, we can offer flexible deployment options to ensure you benefit from the best of all worlds. As a client, you tell us how you would like to deploy your CRM Solution and how you would like to pay for it and we fit in with your requirements. If your needs change and you want to move from on-premise to hosted or vice versa, that’s not an issue for us: Maximizer CRM has the flexibility to cover your needs at any stage in your company’s development.
