SiliconGrassland.com

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the recent lack of IPO’s, specifically in the tech sector. There have been only 4 tech IPO’s in 2008. That’s a really low number. Rackspace recently did an IPO, but it tanked. That’s not good news for little tech companies with a big IPO dream they hope will happen in the next year or so.

Most VC’s get into a deal with the hope of an IPO exit. Obviously that isn’t happening. That’s somewhat concerning for young companies like DataSync who need that mechanism to work to keep capital on tap.

It appears private equity has been eating most of the deals. Yes – big, mean, massive private equity firms that will do deals the size of a typical IPO. Is this good news or bad? We think it’s interesting, and not necessarily bad or good. What we do know from our experience in business consulting is that Sarbanes-Oxley is a pretty menacing issue for smaller IPO’s (typical for technology companies). The administrative overhead of being a public company is enough to kill the interest of a lot of companies from undertaking the task.

We think that the market will correct the regulatory requirements eventually, and the IPO market will take a turn for the better. Until that happens, private equity has a bright future in finding value that public investors can’t access.

Something great happened today – DimDim 4.0 came out. It’s the WebEx killer, and the guys at DimDim are even bold enough to put “WebEx is history” on their frontpage.

This web conferencing application lives up to expectations, and more. For months I have been playing with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Yugma (ug), and some other apps. I just couldn’t stomach paying a lot of money (WebEx and GoToMeeting) or using a crappy application (Yugma) for doing sales-critical webinars at DataSync. I’ve used DimDim in the past, but it just wasn’t quite there yet. Version 4.0 changes that.

First, the latest version of this app supports Mac desktop sharing, a requirement for me to function. Second, DimDim is now all flash and doesn’t require any client-side java application to function. It’s about time. DimDim supports whiteboard and PDF sharing inline, a really nice feature to get your audience involved on collaborative projects.

Here’s a a partial feature list from DimDim’s site:

• Share & Present Documents (PPT/PDFs)
• Share Mac & PC Desktops
• Share Whiteboards
• Share Mics (Built in VoIP & teleconferencing)
• Share Webcams (Live video & audio)
• 2-Way Video Chat
• Recording and playback of meetings
• Multiple Presenters (Host lets others share)
• Public Chat (Instant Messaging)
• Annotations and Markup tools
• Scheduled Meetings
• eMail & Calendaring (Outlook integration)
• Localization
• CRM integration (SugarCRM)

We’ve already looked at adding this app to DataSync Suite, and it’s looking really promising. I do webinars all the time, and it’s great to finally have an application that is open source, user friendly, and does exactly what it’s designed to do.

In my years dealing with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, I’ve learned a lot about two highly connected, yet highly diverse areas of life: business and technology.

Naturally I started on the tech side. I came out of the tech field and viewed CRM primarily as technology geared to solve a set of defined requirements. This made my challenge as a CRM implementor simply to execute on the requirements doc.

One problem: there was never a solid requirements doc. Why? Because businesses don’t have a hardline set of rules for running themselves. It’s true: almost every business gets things done by doing them, not figuring out how they actually do things. Almost every business, including our own, is very dynamic and runs on loosly defined proceses.

However CRM runs totally opposite. CRM, in our case SugarCRM, runs on a hardline set of rules for executing tasks and managing information. CRM itself is designed to guarantee that sales, marketing,  customer services processes are run thoroughly and consistently.

Therein lies the issue. Dynamic businesses need defined processes. I have found that the greatest need today isn’t better CRM software or more of it, but instead a complimentary alignment of both systems. CRM must be designed to be loose enough to fit dynamic business. However it must be defined enough to complete business processes accurately and repeatedly.

In my quest to build great software platforms, I am forced to constantly rethink how software is implemented in businesses today. Often software people and business people think very differently, and translating both languages is always challenging. When I completely figure out how both work I’ll let you know