As most of you may have heard by now, the Saleslogix Company has been sold…again. Our take on this news is mostly positive and seems to line up with what many analysts and industry experts are saying. It was not surprising when Sage sold the company last year since they did not seem to do much with it but it WAS surprising that a much smaller company Swiftpage purchased them. Sage is primarily a software holding company and under their ownership, Saleslogix seemed to have lost its way with no real innovation or improvements ever happening. The product had become stale and uncompetitive with Salesforce and MicrosoftCRM leaving them even further in the rear view mirror. With Swiftpage at the helm, we quickly began to see some real improvements such as Xbar, Saleslogix Mobile, Social Integration, Gmail integration, service packs, performance updates and more but could they sustain this pace? I think the Swiftpage owners got an offer from Infor that they couldn’t refuse. Infor needed a turnkey CRM software solution to complete their business application suite so everybody wins. All indications are that Infor is planning to transform Saleslogix into a serious player and they have the track record to prove it.
They are doubling the investment in Saleslogix development immediately. Saleslogix has always maintained a product roadmap which was throttled by the limitations of their development budget.
They are rebranding Saleslogix to InforCRM. They have relationships with other CRM systems but they now own their own end-to-end CRM codebase platform so they are not restricted on development efforts.
They focus on integrations with their other business solutions. We expect InforCRM to become a true enterprise customer solution that is seamlessly integrated with other Infor business applications.
They focus on vertical solutions specific to large industries and Micro industries (like Breweries and Auto dealerships). They will still offer InforCRM as a generic CRM application however; they will be creating industry specific versions like they currently offer for their ERP software.
They will modernize the UI in 2015. We learned that this has been underway for some time and is being outsourced to a professional New York design firm. They feel the current Saleslogix UI is not as fresh and intuitive as it should be.
They are the largest private Business Application software company in the world. They have the Financial and Marketing resources to quickly move InforCRM into a leadership position in the mid-market CRM space.
Massive hiring of new Saleslogix staff with no changes planned to the existing staff. In addition to bringing Infor’s existing development team into the inforCRM project, they are hiring many additional CRM developers and support staff that will work in the current Scottsdale office.
It was mentioned that they are fully supporting the LAN client for at least 2 years. I’m not sure if the new UI will affect the LAN client but for sure the web client.
Implementation services stay with the Business Partner. They are “partner” centric just as Saleslogix is today so implementation and custom development efforts will remain with the existing Saleslogix partner channel.
Diginomica report http://diginomica.com/2014/08/14/infor-goes-cloud-crm-big-boys-saleslogix-acquisition/#.U_JUFSF0zwx
I’ll say that one of my biggest concerns with this purchase is the commitment to on-premise support and development. The Infor release seems to highlight their prowess in cloud-provisioned application suites and how SLX will fit so well to round out their offerings. But it’s not so clear that the installed on-premise approach is so very important or strategic to this new org…