While on-demand or hosted CRM solutions can provide organizations an easier way to meet its business objectives, there are four key challenges that must be addressed to successfully leverage on-demand solutions.

1. Evaluating Data Ownership and Security

Security is one of the primary fears that companies encounter when evaluating an on-demand solution. In reality, the average service provider has more than sufficient security processes in place. A good service provider will have extensive policies, procedures and technology in place to ensure around-the-clock, optimal performance of the solution. Utilizing a combination of security measures that provide robust, system-wide protection and reliability allows clients to focus on the application and its uses rather than the security infrastructure.

On-demand solutions represent some of the most reliable and scalable applications on the market based on years of internet application development. To achieve expected client results, a service provider must maintain a robust network environment with extensive data redundancy, application monitoring and pre- and post-production quality assurance procedures. Moreover, a multi-tiered operations team is needed to employ industry best practices for disaster recovery and operations support, ensuring quick resolution of client issues including:

• Risk-sensitive disaster recovery systems and processes
• Tiered software quality assurance process
• Co-location and redundancy
• Fault-tolerant system components
• 24x7 application monitoring and technical support

2. Leveraging Existing IT Investments for Seamless Integration

A core architectural philosophy of on-demand solutions is to facilitate a deep legacy/enterprise integration capability that allows organizations to leverage existing application and system investments. The focus of the integration framework is to enable an organization to span multiple systems in order to see a single view of a customer across the enterprise with all of the information that is necessary to effectively handle, manage and report against any interaction, transaction or transaction exception while meeting the following goals:

• Enable customers and partners to integrate the on-demand solution with the existing IT infrastructure without expensive and time-consuming systems integration work.
• Facilitate secure and seamless integration across firewalls.
• Provide minimal impact on customer and partner system.
• Leverage the EAI/B2B integration tools that are available in the market.

The web-based framework leverages data that resides in existing front-end and backend systems versus replacement or integration. This framework and system collaboration process eliminates the integration challenges of data replication and associated data currency and accuracy issues. By doing this, the creation of a relevant and accurate transactional and interaction view is completed in days, not months or years.

3. Customizing On-Demand Solutions to Meet Unique Requirements

Service providers have a couple of different approaches to the way they host CRM solutions. End-users should be aware of which approach would suit their needs the best.

The traditional approach to designing and implementing an on-demand CRM solution for a group of clients involves several procedures that are repeated for every client. The activities include the following:

1. Procure and install hardware into a data center.

2. Configure hardware to meet new client data and communications needs.

3. Procure needed software applications for such functions as sales, service, contact management, knowledge management and CTI.

4. Configure software applications based on each client’s individual needs.

5. Integrate software applications with existing infrastructure.

6. Maintain client-specific infrastructure.

These activities are necessary because each client has different software requirements and varied hardware needs. The service provider has to master multiple hardware technologies and establish a new server cluster for every client. Configuring software to meet specific client needs requires installing multiple application instances and often involves intensive programming.

A next-generation approach to designing and implementing the architectural infrastructure follows a simplified process:

1. Install hardware and multi-tenant software in a data center.
2. Configure a dedicated client program for the customer by leveraging the single application and database instance.
3. Maintain a simplified infrastructure across client accounts without compromising client data or application security.

In contrast to traditional solutions, an on-demand internet application framework functions as a next-generation, interaction-management overlay for legacy applications and business-process integration. Telephony, hardware and software are pre-integrated. The service provider’s only task is to apply template-driven configuration components such as CTI, knowledge management, queuing and routing/workflows, e-mail, chat, analog and digital phone and fax communication tools.

4. Streamlining Implementation and Maintenance

A true, Net-Native J2EE™ solution eliminates the need for client/server applications on user desktops, saving in initial installation and ongoing maintenance costs. Plus, this solution utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security. Moreover, some on-demand solutions can provide an environment that can be customized and extended with additional fields and tabs from the configuration console, without development work. Not only does this result in quick implementations, it also eliminates additional work when upgrading or moving customizations or data schemas during version upgrades, migrations or standard certification to production processes.

Randy Saunders is the marketing director for Cincom’s Customer Experience Management Products. He can be contacted at rsaunders@cincom.com. Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for customer experience management, data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as offers IT and contact center outsourcing. For more information about Cincom, call 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company’s website at www.cincom.com Cincom Systems