And Another Small Business Contact Manager

Is this good news for small businesses. Probably yes, but not necessarily for the obvious reason.

Just announced is Salesforce new Lightweight Contact Manager application designed for small businesses. I’m told there seems to be integration with Google applications, which might persuade lots of people this will be the killer app in the small business sector.

Google mail is getting real traction amongst smaller businesses, and surveys show Google Apps is likely to go the same way. Salesforce dominates the SaaS CRM market and some big companies are reported to have selected Salesforce plus Google Apps for their CRM plus Office systems.

There’s more synergy between the two. Salesforce has dominated Adwords for CRM and salesforce automation over the last several years, so there are market dominance and financial dimensions to such a link up.

But is this Nirvana for smaller businesses? Unlikely!

Neither Salesforce nor Google have a track record of adding value to the technology, and that’s what small businesses need – not a set of tools, but a way of managing their businesses which they don’t need to learn and where they don’t need to plug the gaps.

Google Apps is already a multi user Contact Manager, although not very good. It’s hard for me to see what Salesforce can add, apart from the name of course.

Overall I think this new offer will have a positive impact on the a) awareness of and b) availability of management solutions for small businesses.

It will increase awareness of this type of solution
The whole market will grow as a result
New businesses will want to start up with a solution in place
It will hasten the demise of Outlook, Sharepoint, ACT, Goldmine etc.
All of the recent market entrants who’ve been relying on Adwords to win customers are going to find life much tougher

The typical IT products segment of the small business market will now have one player dominating so the point of competition will move to one of “ideas” and “innovation” and neither Google nor Salesforce are good at those.

I will admit though we will need to do some integration with Google Apps.

Salesforce.com offers contact management for businesses of one (venturebeat.com)
The British Are Waning – Cloud Apps Up, Microsoft Down (uk.techcrunch.com)

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