APLICOR vs. SALESFORCE

APLICOR vs. SALESFORCE

		APLICOR	SALESFORCE
	Data Center Uptime1	100% for last 4 Years	Dozens of System Interuptions
	SLA with financial guarantee2	Yes	No
	Ease of Use3 One Click to anywhere access Many-to-one account viewing System Modification by user	Yes Yes Yes	No No Programming
	CRM Software Scope4 Solution Selling Best Practices Database Competitive Intelligence Content Management Systems (CMS) Mobile Solution Offline Edition Quotes and Sales Order Entry	Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes	Third Party No No No Extra $ Reduced Feature Set Third Party
	Back Office Scope5 Financial Accounting Suite (GL, AP & AR) Distribution Suite (Procurement, Order Entry & Inventory) Job Costing Multi Currency Management Assets	Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes	Third Party Third Party Third Party Third Party Third Party
	Business Intelligence6 Data Warehouses OLAP Predictive Reporting	Yes Yes Yes	Third Party Third Party Third Party
	Productivity Tools Suite7 Forms Designer Workflow Designer Data Modification Toolset	Graphical, drag-and-drop Graphical, drag-and-drop Graphical, drag-and-drop	Syntax Required Syntax Required No
	Hosting Architecture8 Private Assembly Model Client Dedicated Database Client Chooses When to Upgrade Client May Decline Upgrade Until Ready Security Certifications SaaS or On-Premise Delivery	Isolated Tenancy Yes Yes Yes Yes, ISO, NIST, GLBA Yes	Multi Tenant No No No No No
	Customer Support9 Add on Charges for Customer Support Vendor Imposed System Limitations Customer Retention 90 Day Unconditional Exit if Dissatisfied	No No 98.1% Yes	Yes Yes Unknown No
	Company Orientation10 Market Focus Average User Count	Midmarket and Enterprise Over 100	All Things to All People ~17

Information included in this site is acquired from third party sources and believed to be accurate, however, may change without notice and is not guaranteed. The author assumes no responsibility for its use and is not liable for errors and omissions. Each reader is strongly encouraged to further independently evaluate those criteria which are meaningful to them. All trademarks and copyrights used and referenced are property of their respective owners.

1. System Availability; or Lack Thereof: CRM system reliability should not be a gamble. Aplicor has achieved 100% data center uptime since 2003. Salesforce's response to their widely publicized system outages included implementing trust.salesforce.com. However, this web site is not a complete listing of system interruptions. There's probably a reason why trust.salesforce.com chooses to only display the last 30 days of system performance. By only viewing the last 30 days, prior periods of performance degradation, non-working software and other service disruptions previously reported on the web site (such as on 7/5/06, 7/26/06, 7/31/06, 8/1/06, 9/1/06, 9/5/06, 9/11/06, 9/12/06, 9/15/06, 9/20/06, 9/28/06, 10/20/06 and on and on) are no longer visible.




	"Salesforce.com Crashes Again" "Salesforce.com suffered a serious crash that left its hosted CRM service unreachable for much of last Thursday, an outage that came just one day after the company issued a press release hailing its high uptime over the past month."
	CRM Magazine - April 1, 2006
	"Salesforce.com users experienced another service outage on Monday, the latest in a series of minor and major service interruptions for the popular on-demand CRM application. The outage, described by both financial analysts and competitors as "severe," comes at the crucial end-of-month period, when salespeople and other Salesforce users are scrambling to finalize their monthly and quarterly numbers."
	Destination CRM Magazine - January 31, 2006
	"From their [customers] perspective the outage experience has transitioned from an isolated event into a recurring trend."
	Report by Mark Murphy - January 2006 - Managing Director, 1st Albany Capital
	"A Salesforce.com spokeswoman was unaware of the cause or extent of the company's outage when contacted Tuesday. Subsequent attempts to reach other spokespeople were unsuccessful." No status information was posted on their web site, and a customer service number offered only a recorded message advising that "the company was experiencing technical difficulties."
	CRM Magazine - April 10, 2006



2. Service Level Agreements (SLA); with Teeth: Only Aplicor provides each client with an SLA backed with a financial guarantee and without using the guise of "system maintenance" to exclude downtime. When serving users essential information to do their jobs, even a few hours of down time is unacceptable. Even when an SLA is provided, for those vendors that choose to provide one, SLA financial credits don't repay lost productivity. So that downtime doesn't happen in the first place, Aplicor provides N+2 data center redundancy (meaning that network components have a primary and TWO backups) with six multiple internet backbone connections. The network is fully mirrored providing your users a heartbeat cutover to a hot site in case of the unlikely event that users cannot connect to the primary data center. This reduces the likelihood of downtime altogether. Aplicor has the highest hosted CRM customer uptime since 2003 (100%) guaranteed by the best Service Level Agreement (SLA) in the industry.



3. Ease of Use; Superior by Design: Aplicor's user interface provides many-to-one account viewing and one-click-to-anywhere access. This allows the user to leap from one account record to the next in a single keystroke and go anywhere in the system without first having to back-out of multiple screens. Customer groups, forecasted accounts, sale opportunities, today's tasks, activities or other user-defined views can all be accessed with a single click. Customizable search functions allow users to quickly see the things that are important to them and provide them a big picture view along with each account's details. As ease of use means different things to different users, Aplicor users are able to easily change their menu items, account groupings and views to best achieve what they feel is the simplest and most intuitive user interface.




	A lack of software functionality has impaired Salesforce customers. In a May 23, 2005 research report of Salesforce customers, analyst firm Nucleus Research found that "28% of customers had deployed another CRM solution to supplement the functionality in Salesforce.com." The study went on to say "While few customers with an enterprise CRM solution would consider moving away from Salesforce.com if they had achieved a positive ROI, Nucleus Research found one of the biggest challenges facing Salesforce.com is that 38 percent of Salesforce.com customers are open to switching. This partly indicates the low switching costs of on-demand but highlights the fact that for many customers Salesforce.com is a commodity product, not a strategic one that impacts the way they do business." The report concluded "As the On-Demand CRM industry continues to mature, companies are looking for more functionality solutions,” said Rebecca Wettemann. “As a result, Salesforce.com is finding stronger competition and challenges in this marketplace as more products with expanded functionality are becoming available and low cost is only one of the considerations for technology selections."



4. Software Scope; Depth not just Breadth: The majority of the Aplicor CRM software differences sum to a single theme - help sales people sell more. Applying consistent best practices, using competitive intelligence (CI), learning from prior lost sale opportunities, seamlessly incorporating sales methodologies into sale opportunities, automating task and to-do items, scheduling reminders, leveraging templates for email and document correspondence, increasing lead rates by cultivating cold leads with nurture marketing campaigns, automating reporting, and facilitating users with the right information or process support at the right time are examples of helping sales people sell more.
   
   A CI module that's nothing more than three fields isn't serious. Recording an activity such a conference call or a meeting without being able to designate it to a sale opportunity, record its status, schedule a reminder and schedule a next step doesn't enhance user productivity. A sale opportunity page that can't identify the lead source for the opportunity, can't attach the proposal document, can't designate the sale team working the deal and can't track the elapsed time of the opportunity lacks serious usefulness.



5. Enterprise-wide Business Systems; Single Vendor Accountability: Aplicor stands alone in offering integrated front-to-back office SaaS business software solutions. In contrast to multiple vendor solutions with varying user interfaces, different technologies, uncoordinated upgrade cycles and multiple support sources, Aplicor provides one integrated product suite, one agreement, one invoice, one technical support number and one accountable partner.



6. Business Intelligence; A Powerful Difference: The Aplicor Business Intelligence (BI) suite takes reporting to the next level. Data warehousing, OLAP (online analytical processing) and predictive reporting are all hallmarks uniquely delivered by Aplicor BI. The BI suite permits visual interrogation, manipulation and what-if analysis for forecasting various business scenarios.



7. Productivity Tools; Empowering Analysts, not Programmers: In reality, the differences between productivity tools are not so much what they can do, but how they do it. Aplicor tools are designed for non-technical resources - including users, business analysts and system administrators. They are all graphical tools which use drag-and-drop functionality and logical assembly constructs.




	"While (Salesforce) offers tools for customization and adding additional applications to its platform, building out those features requires a customer to invest the resources himself or work with a third-party independent software vendor."
	Network World Magazine - June 13, 2005



8. A Hosting Model with Individual Client Control: Aplicor uses an isolated hosting model which provides client autonomy so that each hosted client is offered the CRM software control as if the software were installed locally for their exclusive benefit. The isolated tenancy hosting model provides each client a dedicated database for complete autonomy, increased security, predictable performance and assured privacy. This individual autonomy also allows each client to incur unique software customization, integration and database access in a properly secured environment and without the constraints imposed by a shared-systems hosting platform. Isolated tenancy also permits clients to choose if and when to upgrade their CRM application - instead of the vendor making the choice for you and without your consent. We recognize clients don't always have the business need or desire to upgrade their systems at the first available offering. Further, we appreciate that many clients would like to review the upgrade in advance and properly plan user training, system integration adjustments or customization implications.



9. Customer Support and Inclusive Pricing: Aplicor delivers all CRM software and customer support for a single price. No add-on charges, no bait and switch to a more expensive version, no additional pricing for additional CRM software modules, no add-on charges if you actually want to talk to a support representative in a timely fashion. The pricing model is simple and without surprises.
   
   We pride ourselves in providing the best customer support in the SaaS hosting industry. Every customer is assigned a dedicated Account Manager and 24 by 7 support is standard. In contrast to a customer revolving door (e.g. "Thirty-eight percent of Salesforce.com customers are planning to or would consider moving to another solution." Source: Nucleus Research), we believe Aplicor's outstanding customer support is evidenced by achieving the highest customer retention rate in the hosted CRM industry for 2004, 2005 and 2006 (98.1% for the three year average).




	CRM companies which fail to achieve the most basic customer relationship objectives, such as customer retention, incur a credibility problem. According to a Deutsche Bank Securities analysis, Salesforce had lost an astonishing 35,288 subscribers in the last four consecutive quarters alone.



10. Company Focus: We believe there's something to be said for a company with market focus versus an all things to all people company. We don't try to dumb down our system so that it can be used by small businesses or order takers. We focus on mid-market and enterprise and deliver a CRM software system which supports people selling solutions - consultative selling, selling to buying committees, incurring longer sales cycles and facing formidable competition.




	A June 22, 2005 JMP Securities implementation assessment report illustrates what can occur when small business CRM solutions attempt to exceed their reach. In reviewing the stalled Salesforce roll-out at Cisco Systems Inc., the review found that approximately 9 months into the implementation project, the project is 9 months behind schedule. The analysts stated that Cisco users have been slow to embrace the Salesforce system because it doesn't support tools that handle tasks such as territory management, advanced account hierarchies and forecasting. Computerworld author Marc Songini thereafter reported the JMP report was "damning", required Cisco to "throw more resources at the project", that "problems are causing users to revert to old CRM systems" and that "...analysts said the report calls into question Salesforce.com's ability to handle large implementations."