After quite some time, yesterday we had a prospect trying to decide between Impel and an in-premise system. At our weekly sales status meeting, this came up as quite a shocker since this was not an issue that we had to deal with recently.

The question that we asked the prospect was “Do you want to run your business or run your software?” Well, not quite so bluntly, but that was the gist If you are a manufacturing company or a travel company or a distribution company, your whole focus would naturally be on running your own business. Would you even want to be saddled with the problems of firewalls, IP addresses, databases, server purchases and upgrades, software installations, backups and such? Would you want the hassle of trying to keep an IT and systems administrator in place to maintain those systems? And would you want the hassles of paying for annual maintenance contracts just for bug-fixes, with big money to upgrade to the next version of your in-premise software.

That’s the pain that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like Impel CRM completely remove from your life. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection to access Impel from wherever you may be. And in many cases, your salespeople don’t even need a computer to access Impel. All they need is a simple phone with SMS to do many of the routine CRM tasks.  The infrastructure required to set up a system like this in-premise would be mind-boggling. With Impel, all this comes included in your regular monthly subscription price. And if you need to increase the number of users on Impel, all it needs is for you to tell us how many more users. No need to fret about additions to your infrastructure, servers, databases.

With Impel’s SaaS / cloud computing model, it’s sayonara to all your IT hassles. Just use it and pay for what you use!

Although my time at Impel was relatively short, a mere 3½ months, I found that I was very emotional when it all came to an end. I journeyed 13,688 km from Washington, D.C. to work for Impel during my summer leave from school, not knowing what to expect when I got here. What I feared the most was the uncertainty of the office environment, I was unsure of how I would fit in. Would they like me? Would I feel awkward? Looking back at the feelings of butterflies fluttering in my stomach, I realize just how wrong I was.

It took me all one five minutes to dispel my initial fears, I knew from the first people I met that I would be welcomed here. The next three months that followed I believed I learned more information than I had ever learned before.  I suspect that what I learned from the Impel team will be an invaluable resource throughout the rest of my professional career and my personal relationships. To convey just what I mean, I have broken my experience down into three stages; acceptance, teamwork, and performance.

Acceptance by the Impel team is what led me to my first realization about the community I had entered. Everyone was here to work and make the company stronger, and instead of seeing me as an outsider they saw me as an asset.  The professionalism with which my arrival was handled was remarkable, and helped me greatly to fit in with my fellow co-workers. We were all here to do a job, and it was up to us to work together to achieve our goals.

This brings me to teamwork. The degree of open collaboration and communication that I experienced working in the office is something I hope to find in future teams. The way the office community collaborated as a team, gave them the ability to work through difficult situations quickly, handle customer concerns efficiently, and provide outstanding service.  Everyone in the office understood that whether you were a part of the development team, marketing team, or support team, we were all a part of the Impel team.

That kind of goal oriented mentality increased the company’s performance and drove the business forward. When pressure reared its ugly head, everyone was ready to take on the tasks set before them, even if it wasn’t their department.  To give a specific example, during Impel’s recent shift to the New User Interface, our support team became bogged down with queries from various users. To provide the customer with the best service possible, the support team went out of their job description and began answering emails and taking phone calls. Needless to say, our customers appreciated that kind of service, “In addition to the product, I would commend the high quality of response to queries/issues and the emphasis placed by the team to solve issues at the earliest.” said Venkataramanan Mandalam from EduSports.

Being part of such a terrific team at Impel was truly a once in lifetime experienced. As I head back to the United States I hope to apply the lessons I have learned from the Impel team to the pursuit of both my education and my future career.

Before you respond that this is an inappropriate comparison, let me apologize if I am affecting religious sentiments here. I have no intent to comment on religion itself but just to use some of the tools it gives us in my own context. And I would not be surprised if the Acharyas would’ve approved – after all, ancient Indian thought has a strong tradition of argument.

Preparing for a recent TiE discussion about Cloud Computing, Sharad Sharma, who headed the discussion, suggested we use the “neti neti” (or “na-iti na-iti” – “Not this, not this” in Sanskrit) model to define Cloud Computing. Basically, this is an Upanishadic approach to defining God, much used by Adi Shankara, where participants define what God is NOT, tending to a very clear definition of what God could be. Cloud Computing in the tech space is as all-encompassing – and as vague – as God, so the mechanism seemed appropriate. Talking about this with our Sales and Marketing VP (and co-founder), she came up with not one or two but TEN different things that SaaS is not. Here, I’m going to discuss them in what I think are increasing levels of complexity, so please bear with me on the descriptions!

1. Not physical delivery of anything. This is straight-forward – in SaaS, you sign up, you use it. No CDs, no DLL registration, nothing that’s physically sent to the customer or the user.
2. Not IT-heavy. This is a no-brainer – there’s no question that SaaS needs no in-house IT. Apart from keeping the software itself current, the SaaS vendor does all the heavy lifting in terms of infrastructure, access controls, security, scaling and so on. Customers only worry about how to use the software for their own objectives.
3. Not long-term contracts. I recognize SaaS companies would like to see long contracts with their customers (Who wouldn’t?), but I think that dilutes the value of the business proposition – when you have someone signed up to use your software for years, no matter what you deliver, you tend to be less effective. So in my mind, “true SaaS” is all about the customer re-avowing himself/herself to our software every few months by writing a new cheque. That, I think, is critical to his/her satisfaction and our effectiveness.
4. Not long deployments. When buying complex software, the infrastructure (server, OS, database, etc.) for it must first be bought and set up. After weeks of that, the software itself must be installed, configured and field-tested. With SaaS, since you’ll use hardware and software that’s already in place, there’s virtually no start-up time. And good SaaS vendors include user-driven configurability in their products, so you’re up and running in the first few hours. Moreover, since (again!) good SaaS vendors use “platforms” for development, optional customization happens in days and weeks, not months and years.
5. Not “just for SMEs”. There’s no question that SMEs are the biggest targets for SaaS, but that’s not because larger companies cannot benefit from SaaS solutions. It’s because selling ANYTHING to larger companies is more complex and time-consuming than selling to the “mudalaali” (as Srikant Rao pointed out in the Panel yesterday) in a smaller company. Further, in countries like India where tech skills are hard to come by (thanks to the success of the IT Services companies), larger corporations, too, buy into SaaS solutions.
6. Not “all or nothing”. Unlike in an in—premise purchase where you shell out lakhs of ` for software before you even begin using it, SaaS allows customers to start small and scale up as they get comfortable with the idea. You can choose to automate only small parts of your organization, you can choose to automate ALL functions but only with key users, you can do all kind of slicing and dicing along the way. And you can do all that paying small amounts of money.
7. Not shelfware. The market-research group Gartner recently sparked a debate about how SaaS customers, too, have a “shelfware” problem – where they buy subscriptions but don’t use them. While that may be true of SaaS vendors who push for long-term contracts with customers, it’s not true of the newer breed of SaaS vendors, where payments range from one month to three. So if a customer sees no value in the first quarter, s/he doesn’t renew – it’s that simple. More importantly, as the vendor, companies like us constantly monitor and agonize over usage. We look at who’s NOT logged in and go back to those customers to figure out what we can do better for them. That gives them an opportunity to tell us they’re not interested, but it also gives us the opportunity to figure out how we can be better.
8. Not “not customizable”. One of the biggest myths about SaaS that I’ve heard is that it is not “customizable”. Nothing could be farther from the truth – if SaaS companies choose to not customize their software, that’s probably because of business reasons, not technical ones. We, for one, DO customize – and very heavily, at that. We routinely have our larger (in terms of seat-count) customers ask for fairly complex changes to the software, reflecting their specific business or process needs. And all that customization happens within the same, hosted, multi-tenant software that all of our customers use. So when someone logs into a customized user ID, they may see things work in a completely different manner from what other users see. That’s because our architecture is “customizable by design”. Like the better SaaS vendors out there, we use a strong set of tools to build our software. And those tools are designed to support a deep level of customization for specific users. So no, SaaS solutions are NOT “not customizable”.
9. Not the cheapest solution. OK, now we’re getting into some hairy areas, but I will press on nonetheless. I will be the first to admit that, in a comparison with some specific solutions over a five-year period, we may not work out cheaper. There are a huge number of factors that go into an apples-to-apples comparison and I’ve rarely seen a comprehensive list. There’s server hardware, infrastructure software, bandwidth, power, fail-over, backup, systems administration – I can go on. But my submission here is that, even if we DID list all of those items, even if we DID correct them for some companies spending less or more on a specific item than others, we’ll still be unable to make a clear comparison. For one simple reason: Upgrade. As I’ve written earlier, SaaS companies deliver enhancements every few weeks, automatically and painlessly. The value of those upgrades is incalculable, IMHO, because they’re incremental and they’re very closely tied to what the vendor sees customers asking for. Non-SaaS companies deliver upgrades, too, but they’re so far and few in-between that each upgrade is an Event. As such, it needs to be planned for, migrated, tested, scaled – pretty much everything you did the first time you bought the software and more. With SaaS, it’s like Love (they tell me…) – it just happens.
10. Not the solution to all problems. As strong a proponent of SaaS as I am, I have to admit that there are many situations where SaaS may not apply. I do believe that the set of those situations is reducing, but they’re there for sure. Graphics-heavy analytical apps, for example – very clearly, doing all that on the Cloud just does not make sense. Tracking real-time responses from network-connected devices, too, may not be a great use-case for SaaS. In some retail situations, too, SaaS may not be the best mechanism – although I do know of companies running hosted Retail solutions very successfully (Wondersoft is a good example). In fact, at the discussion last evening, there was some conversation about the future of Software Services as a business. I was fairly clear (I think!) about my opinion: that SaaS works for some (most!) companies, but there are lots of companies/situations where custom development fits better. So Services companies will continue to grow. They will also espouse SaaS development for their own customers where that makes sense. And there will continue to be new situations where the best-fit solution may not be SaaS-based (not in CRM, though ).

So there’s our list of न इति definitions for SaaS. Would love to hear other opinions – after all, we all love an argument!

She was not talking about the process of development in PK4 (although some of our customers may think so). Vinutha, the key architect of our new Web 2.0 User Interface (to be released soon – watch this space!), was talking of the server we use for our software development. But her comment did ring true in a different sense. Most of our customers, when they want custom work done, give us some truly Herculean tasks to be performed in very short order. And they wonder why it is that we take “so much time” to do them. Well, I’ve had some personal experience with this over the last two weeks, so here are some thoughts about it all.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been wrestling with upgrading our Ad Hoc Query mechanism. It works well already, but we wanted to add some enhancements that users have asked for – better ways to manipulate dates, for example. The way that component is built, it uses an engine from a partner company that does all the magic. But the user interface, the underlying data structures and the overall data access mechanism is all ours. So here we have a mish-mash of four different technologies (HTML/JavaScript, FreeMarker, Java and SQL), making for a complex piece of code to begin with. Further, one part of the infrastructure (the partner engine) is a “black box” that we have no source-code access to. So all in all, as the guy looking to “upgrade” this thing, I had four technologies that I had little knowledge of and one component that I had no clue about. I’m sure the programmers (or managers!) among you are going: “OK, so what’s the problem?” The fact is, I haven’t “coded” in years now. So not knowing a specific technology was not really that much of an issue: after all, I didn’t know ANY of the current technologies anyway. The issue was really about figuring out how they all hang together, and that took some doing. Between Google, postgresql.org and sites like stackoverflow, I figured out enough to actually add the functions that we need. There were times when I woke up in the middle of the night sweating SQL. There were times when I wondered why the English language wasn’t as ordered as XML. But at the end of it all, I actually managed to produce a fairly valuable enhancement to the Ad Hoc Reporting Engine.

As part of this process, I also began to understand the complexity of some of the things we do in Engineering. We use a high-throughput engine (our own “PaaS”, for the technically-correct out there) that helps us deal with the intricacies of multi-tenancy, mega-tenancy, robustness, etc. But we still need to spend the time understanding the implications of each change on the system as a whole. As important, we need to understand the implications on one customer vs. another. With mega-tenant customers, we need to synchronize data models across tenants, sometimes servers. With multiple identical app instances, we still need to work on keeping them identical. Some of this is about SaaS, but most of this is just about the complexity of technology, no matter what type of technology it is. A typical car has 10,000 to 12,000 parts; Impel has nearly five hundred tables, over a thousand relationships, nearly two thousand pages, tens of thousands of functions in those pages. So even minor customization is like replacing a car’s steering wheel with a joystick. No wonder it takes us time and effort!

All this notwithstanding, we still upgraded our Development server!

Most of the organizations have customer data and records across departments, but how many in the company are aware of all the customer interactions that take place on a daily-basis?

To build and retain profitable relationship with a customer, it’s essential for everyone in a company to have access to the 360-degree view of customer transactions. Getting a 360-degree view is essential strategic value for organizations that want to deliver high quality customer service and support, to optimize marketing and product development. Used effectively, the 360-degree view strengthens customer retention and profitability also.

What is 360 degree view of Customer?

A 360-degree view of the customer is a single view of all customer interactions. It integrates all the customer information that is available in separate departments of an organization in to one repository. 360 Degree View is also a Business Approach which puts the customer at the center of the organization and aids a platform for quality customer service.

Impel CRM empowers you to track customer satisfaction at the most granular level possible through the 360 Degree View of Customers which seamlessly combines all of the Customer data across departments  into a single powerful, easy-to-use portal-like environment. This makes life easier, most importantly to the customer support representatives.

Benefits of Impel CRM’s 360 degree Customer View.

• Provides comprehensive view of customer across departments from marketing to sales, operations, finance, and other business functions. This helps your internal teams (marketing, sales and customer support) to collaborate easily.
• All the activities specific to a customer be it your marketing campaign emails, phone calls, follow-ups, meetings, service requests, responses and updates all of these activities gets tagged against that particular customer providing a single view.
• A 360-degree solution enables you to access consolidate customer data helping your support agents to speed up response times without having to switch between screens or await update responses from related teams.
• With the 360-degree view, you can provide a consistent and satisfying service experience for customers, as you have access to the right information instantly in a single –view. This also improves your customer interaction.
• Your call quality increases, reduces call duration which eventually saves your money.

Creating a single view for all customers is an important strategic objective. The Impel’s 360-degree approach you can replace separate functions such as call centers, customer service departments and sales by integrated in a single system with all the required data for efficiently delivering quality support to customers.

“We are using CRM software for sales and related activities. However we are not growing our business, our executives are finding this software very cumbersome and difficult to work upon. I’m in a fix whether to keep using this solution as we have invested in to this or to go for some simple, cost effective CRM software”?

Does this sound like something you’ve heard? Well that’s true!

Finding the right CRM solution that meets your requirements is one thing but getting your team to use it efficiently is a challenge. Technology alone cannot win user acceptance. The User Experience, or how easy it is for the end-user to navigate and use is the key to acceptance. While choosing a CRM for your organization you need to focus on who the end-users are. And what they are trying to do. Most importantly how effectively and easily they can work with the new software will determine whether the software gets used at all.

You will be able to grow your business only when you have a productive workforce, empowered with a simple, fast and easy-to-use CRM system. Handling CRM business processes with an easy-to-navigate interface is not only extremely convenient, but it also saves you time and money.

Welcome to the brand new look of Impel, where we’ve put the power of CRM directly in your hands. The more user-friendly, more “active” interface enables you to get your sales and marketing tasks done faster and more efficiently. The default screens are laid out to give you access to only the fields that you would require most often. The pages have a clean feel with simple menus and no confusing icons so that even occasional users can use the system without any training.

But if you need additional fields to configure Impel to your business, then go right ahead. A simple drag-and-drop interface lets you create your own fields and drop them into a layout that reflects your business. So if your sales team is used to working with paper-based forms, then you have the power to make your Impel screens look exactly like your paper forms. And you can do all this on your own with Impel’s intuitive interface; no phone calls to anyone, no more e-mails, no need to pay for customization. Impel’s new Web 2.0 interface makes your team more productive and efficient; while saving you time and money.

Today the SaaS and cloud solutions drives the CRM market, right from 8-10 percent of the CRM market in 2005 to 20 percent of the market in 2008 and now more than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of software as a service (SaaS), said Gartner. SaaS and cloud CRM solutions spurred the evolution of computing — with no more software installations, no infrastructure management and no more upgrades. With SaaS and cloud CRM solutions, development and implementation can now be accomplished in a fraction of seconds as compared to days and months of deployment needed for an in-premise solution.

We offer businesses the flexibility of a unique, CRM model. Impel CRM. Impel is a web based comprehensive CRM Solution that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. The immediate benefits you see are a single repository of customer information, higher sales-per-salesperson and lower impact of salesperson turnover.  Impel gives you enterprise-class functionality at SME affordability.  With Impel, you can:

• Completely track your salespeople’s activities and contacts
• Enable everyone in your organization to achieve operational excellence with a single 360-degree view of the customer
• Increase customer acquisition, retention, loyalty, and profitability with standardized and improved sales methodologies
• Empower your sales team with real-time pipeline and forecasting to direct focus to the most profitable opportunities
• Exclusive customer portal through which your customer can reach you directly and vice versa.

In addition to the new drag and drop configurability of the user interface – the business logic behind Impel CRM is also configurable thus allowing you to easily set up the appropriate business layouts that are inherent to the application. Impel CRM is : 

• Easy to Customize and personalize
• Flexibility of mobile integration
• Hosted and multi-tenant
• User-friendly and Configurable

 Impel CRM –CCI: ( Call center Integration) 

Impel CRM CCI offers a broad range of features and functionality designed to empower agents to better respond to customer needs and requests. With Impel, businesses can improve productivity, reduce support costs, boost sales revenues, and improve customer satisfaction. Impel can be seamlessly integrated with a the telephony infrastructure. So, interactive voice response (IVR), call recording, and call routing systems can be directly linked to the CRM software. Read More…… 

Impel CRM – Mobile:  

In today’s competitive marketplace, salespeople need to be in touch with their customers and prospects 24×7. Sales Force Automation is a very important tool to beat the completion and having information on the go helps the salesperson come out on top. Impel Mobile lets salespeople manage appointments and activities, add and review account and contact information and quickly add a potential customer as a lead into Impel CRM. Integrated access to leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts and activities gives sales people the information that they need at the point of customer engagement. This helps to shorten the sales cycle and close deals quickly. ( Read More)

Impel CRM- SMS 

BY using Impel SMS your field teams can input data no matter where they are, so as an organization you will have much better control,since salespeople will be able to check on inventory level, pricing information from the customer site, they can have better control on orders. Because of the low cost of SMS, and the fact that salespeople on the field can enter orders, you anticipate a decrease in your order entry costs, Since support people can place requests for equipment right after they finish examining equipment, you feel that you can reduce customer support call cycles quite a lot. An integrated Impel SMS gets tagged with the activities for the 360 degree view of the Account ( Read More)

Your field sales representative is at your dealer’s store placing new orders with a few clicks from his mobile, directly into your CRM system. His smart phones beeps with a sms stating that a new lead is been assigned to him from his territory. On the other side your sales operations executive receives the real-time updates of the new order placed within few seconds along with complete set of details and updates of the store visit.

Wow, that’s an ultra productive sales force!  This isn’t a scene from the future. This is something that you can do right now. Thanks to Impel Mobile CRM.

When your Business has a “Feet on Street” model of sales activity, empowering your busy sales representatives is no longer a nice-to-have but must-have.  By extending Impel CRM ‘s capabilities to your  sales rep’s phone you can gain “anytime, anywhere” access to key customer information with a powerful yet easy-to-use application that increases the productivity and effectiveness of sales professionals on the road.

Key Features of  Impel Mobile CRM:

“Impel Mobile CRM” solution delivers tremendous advantages to “on the go” sales teams, allowing them to stay connected to vital customer data, no matter where they are.  Some of these are:

• Get instant CRM updates via sms.
• Access real-time account or contact details, history, and track status of opportunities, leads.
• View customer, product and prices details anytime.
• Add notes, updates to your sales activities and meetings on the fly.
• Place orders instantly from the field.
• Plan and schedule meetings and activities efficiently.
• Manage time better leading to a productive sales team.
• Respond immediately and efficiently to every opportunity, lead and request.

With Impel Mobile CRM, you can automate, simplify, and manage all the information your sales team needs with this comprehensive tool that also drives pipeline, and increases the productivity of your sales representatives.

Over the last two months, we’ve spent an enormous amount of effort into putting together a new “face” for Impel – a Web 2.0 face. Our objectives in doing this were fairly clear: we wanted a more friendly, more “active” interface that gave users a better handle on their sales- and customer-related tasks. Along the way, we also wanted to standardize the overall look-and-feel, bring out the full depth of Impel and put its power in the hands of users directly.

This has been one of our biggest frustrations, actually: we see so many things users COULD do with Impel, on their own, but had not been given the user-interfaces for. Take the example of Custom Objects. We have a customer who’s using Impel to track surveys of customer satisfaction in a chain of Chinese restaurants. The Surveys are a “custom object” in Impel, i.e. they were defined specifically for this customer, but without any real programming. We configured a bunch of flags and screens and gave the customer the ability to track something that we, as the designers of Impel, had never thought of. But unfortunately, WE had to do the configuration. We had to use the “back-end”, as we call it, to set up the flags in Impel’s database, so that the correct pages appeared in the appropriate locations on screen. It would’ve been so much simpler if the customer could’ve done this on his/her own. It would have improved the accuracy of the objects, removed the frustration that users feel in describing their needs to geeks and – as important – reduced our work. Going Web 2.0 was very clearly one way we could do that.

Armed with so many large objectives, we set off on our journey some weeks ago. First off, we decided to look at the well-done Web 2.0 apps out there. (Before we go too far, let me admit that my “definition” of Web 2.0 is probably applicable only in our own context: the use of JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, DOM and that whole alphabet-soup for creating a truly rich user experience). We saw a lot of Web 2.0 apps – everything from Apsona thru Buxfer to RememberTheMilk and Zimbra. We looked at some of the 37Signals products. We even saw competing CRM solutions that used some Web 2.0 technology in their offerings. But, I’m afraid, we found nothing that reflected anything close to our needs. You’re probably rolling eyes going “Yeah right”, but honestly, look at the factors we have to work with:

• Most of our pages have LOTS of fields. We have customers who want to see over 150 fields on a regular Contact page, tracking everything from the individual’s birthday to her sister’s name (yep, that’s a real field in one customer’s configuration). I love the clean look that a HighRiseHQ has, but there’s no way we can lay out 150 fields one below the other – users would grow old scrolling.
• Images are distracting. We began with the idea, in Impel, that users would get used to representation of certain objects by their image. For example, a bag of cash could be an icon that represents an Opportunity, telling the user to click there. Unfortunately, a number of our users found that confusing and distracting – they’d rather see a link that told them what it was for. Buxfer’s pop-out list of functions, for example, looks really neat, but I didn’t see our business users memorizing what each icon meant.
• Customers have lots of data. Users typically deal with a few thousand Contact records, lots and lots of Activities and so on. Some users have tens of thousands of Contacts, since some of our customers have over a million prospect records. Lists become critical, in that context, and I haven’t seen a reasonable presentation of that anywhere yet.
• We support lots of contextual functions. Given an Account, you can do at least six things on it (Edit, +Contact, +Activity and so on); given a Contact, even more (send SMS, send email, send as SMS…). The Buxfer model works well for showing contextual menus, but images are probably not descriptive enough for a business user.
• Multi-tenancy has its implications. Even in a simple thing as a SmartSuggest list where, say, we want to show a list of Dealers that an Opportunity can be assigned to, we have different definitions of what constitutes a “Dealer”, depending on our customer. Some customers allow Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, etc. to be assigned to Dealers only, some to Distributors also and so on. That’s a complexity not typical in today’s Web 2.0 apps, since it’s mostly about a complex data model manifesting itself in a JSON front-end.
• We don’t use a local data-store. Thanks to the volume of data, its security, the complexity of each record and so on, we rejected the idea of a local store like Google Gears. And this is a multi-user, multi-company system anyway, so the stuff that users see needs to be fairly current. We have users that watch inbound leads from their websites on their Call Center page, so going back to the server in most cases is a necessity.

All this is not to take away from what’s out there. In fact, if we’ve done a good job, it’s only because we “stood on the shoulders of giants”, like Newton said. Apsona, for example, demonstrates very well the use of JavaScript and related client-side technologies for a great Corporate User Experience.

Net effect, we learnt a lot and implemented things the way we saw it work for our users. We added the ability for users to manage their own custom fields. Users can also lay out their pages the way they want to see them. And they can share their page definitions, so everyone doesn’t have to recreate their preferences. For the more aesthetically-inclined, we even have a selection of themes to work with. Along the way, we also fixed a number of irritants in our earlier user interface (yes, your filter is remembered now!). And, we had to kill off – at least temporarily – some of the things we had in there earlier. The Expand capability on most lists, for example – that’s something we’ll reintroduce in some time now.

Overall, though, we believe we’ve done a good job on rebuilding the Impel user interface. Lots more to be done – preemptive list downloads, but we’ll be able to do that faster now, since we have a single JavaScript front-end for all the new pages. Go on, give it a spin, tell us what you think of it all. Just remember the most important four-letter-word in software – Beta!

As said in my previous blog “SaaS the Best Fit for SMB’s”,  SaaS has being an increasingly adopted tool for small businesses.  SaaS is a concept that allows you to “Consume” software on a subscription basis as a “Service”,  instead of the traditional expensive model.

There are a number of benefits to be gained from the SaaS platform for both small business and individual users and this article reveals the “Take Aways” and the best of the reasons/benefits for switching to a SaaS solution for your software needs.

• Anytime Anywhere Access:

One of the greatest advantages of SaaS Application is the freedom it provides you in terms of where and when you choose to work or access the application data stored. It’s the providers business to deliver seamless access of application to their clients anytime, anywhere increasing the overall productivity. Also the service provider ensures that the data is safer than it would be if it was to be stored on your computer.

• Automatic Upgrades:

One will always have the latest version whenever you access your SaaS applications, because there is always only one version available all time.  This also means that the service provider is capable of quickly making changes within matter of hours if an error is found d in the software without causing any impact to your business.

• Cost Effectiveness:

We know that finding the right solution also means finding one that makes economic sense for your business. With SaaS model deployment,  software is subscribed and not purchased. Therefore expenses are not front loaded (Zero Capex) and are made up of predictable monthly fees. The biggest cost savings actually come from the reduction in manpower and the IT resources (servers, databases etc) required maintaining the applications in-house. There are also considerable savings from other areas such as reduced or no implementation, up-gradations costs.

• Customizable Interface:

Leveraging the power of Software as a Service (SaaS),  you can customize IT to fit your business  rather than fitting your business to what the software can provide.  The ability to modify functionality and processes in SaaS applications are more quickly and in a more iterative way than the traditional software model and specifically tailored to meet your preferences. This also means that the Business can operate more efficiently and align their process strategically to seize more competitive advantage.

• Not Platform Specific:

It does not matter whether the computer you are using runs on MAC, Windows or Linux, as long as you are able to use a browser and access the internet then you can access your  SaaS application with a fewer clicks. The majority of SaaS applications are not browser specific. This also makes it far easier to switch platforms if one desires.

Overall, SaaS model offers you rapid deployment, enterprise-class functionality and reliability, all-inclusive of maintenance and upgrades and a reduced burden on your IT resources — all at a low subscription price!!! These are huge knock-on effects of adopting SaaS solutions.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the future of business application software, Empower your business by adopting SaaS applications !!!

About Impel CRM:

Impel CRM is an integrated CRM solution that lets you put your customer at the center of your business. Available in different editions, covering every aspect of sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service automation. Its comprehensive functionality is built to accelerate sales. Enriched by features like sales activity planning, E2E consumer marketing, SMS integration, and Call Center Management makes Impel CRM an empowered and easy to deploy on-demand CRM solution.

For more information, Please visit http://www.impelcrm.in