UpShot focuses on sales management

AS FRUSTRATION WITH CRM projects continues to mount, many company are turning for help to ASPs. One of the leading players in this space is UpShot, which delivers a service based on top of Microsoft’s Windows technologies. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Keith Raffel, UpShot chairman and founder, talks about why companies such as Pfizer, American Airlines, and Xerox are turning to CRM services.

InfoWorld: What specific aspect of CRM does UpShot focus on?

InfoWorld: How does your approach differ from competitors such as Salesforce.com?

Raffel: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we’ve certainly been flattered by them all over the place. We were the first ones out with a sales management service. They borrowed a few engineers [who] worked on originally getting our service out and started Salesforce.com.

InfoWorld: Given your focus on Windows technologies, what impact will Microsoft.Net have on your service?

Raffel: We actually brought something out two months ago which was our first step down the Microsoft.Net path. An online service needs an offline component — which [may] seem a little curious, but you’ve got to work on an airplane and [in] other places where you’re not going to have Internet access. At the same time, the whole advantage of an online service is there’s no deployment involved, there’s no client to be involved, there’s no IT staff required to keep … the same release on everybody’s machines, etc. What we’ve done for offline is come up with an offline client that actually is Excel. It’s Excel except it looks like UpShot and you download the information. We’re using our XML APIs together with some of the .Net services that are in Excel 2000 to go do that communication back and forth.

InfoWorld: In essence, are you an application service provider?

Raffel: We never really call ourselves an ASP anymore. It seems to have gone out of style, mostly because it was just so vague as to exactly what it was. We look at ourselves as being a Web service.

InfoWorld: Do you use any Java in your service?

Raffel: We use Java as well, but we’re a service, and so in a sense what we’re running in the back office doesn’t matter to people except that we are a Microsoft back end. Are we going to go run on Oracle or Sun or everything else and offer something that way? No. We’re riding the Microsoft.Net horse right now.

InfoWorld: Is Microsoft Passport something you intend to support?

Raffel: Our customers tell us that Passport is for consumers and it’s not for businesses. So that’s not something that we’re supporting at the current time.

InfoWorld: How hard is it to compete with Siebel in this economy?

Raffel: Companies are now saying they can’t spend millions of dollars and wait months and years to get a return on [their] investment. You have large companies that are saying, “I need help right now.” The downturn in the economy [has] actually ended up serving us well. When people have all the money in the world, all the time in the world, and no sense of urgency, there’s no reason to change the way they’ve been doing things. That’s all changed now. We certainly go into companies that have had experience with Siebel. I have a lot of respect for what Siebel [has] done. Obviously, people are buying it, but the people [who] are buying it are looking for something different than the people who are buying us. We’re an alternative to Siebel and a different kind of alternative. I think that [what] you’ll find among UpShot customers is that the sales team rallies behind UpShot. I think that [in] some of the other companies with client/server roots, Siebel is sort of imposed on them.

InfoWorld: Are potential customers worried about the security aspects of using a service?

Raffel: Customers send out security officers and everything else you can imagine. I don’t want to quote them in particular, but others have said, “When we look at what you do to protect our data, you do at least as well and really better than we do.” They just don’t want to admit that too loudly.

InfoWorld: Most companies have some sort of homegrown system in use. How do you get data out of those systems and into your service?

Raffel: We have a nice little Java tool that goes and sucks out what’s there and goes and puts it into UpShot. We have a team of people who will do that with your data. We’ll actually guarantee to get a company up and running in only 15 business days. That’s because we have people standing by to get [your] data ready, people standing by to work with you to configure your data, etc.

InfoWorld: What kind of business intelligence tools do you provide for people using the service?

Raffel: When you look at what UpShot provides, it does a pretty good job of providing lots of functionality in that sales arena, including some analytics. We’ve extended the forecasting to provide real enterprise-level forecasting in real time. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the things you see from us in 2002 is an extension of what we do in analytics, to let people slice and dice that data every which way. We have a bunch of reporting tools in there that will show you where you should be … against where you are. We have a famous little radar screen, so you can actually look on a radar screen and see where things are coming in and where they are and where they need to be. We’ve also got pipeline reports [that show] here’s where you need to be, and you can see where you’re lower than you need to be. One of the things that we find, interestingly, is that sales executives feel especially comfortable with Excel. We have made [it] painless to send data into Excel and manipulate it. There’s a button in the Excel spreadsheet and it refreshes all your data all the time.

InfoWorld: How important is wireless support going to be?

Raffel: We work on a handheld PDA, on Palm VII or Palm V with a modem. We work on a cell phone now. Quite frankly, [only] a small minority of our users take advantage of that. The ones who do, love it. But for most people, they find the wireless infrastructure to be a little on the slow side. I think that in the first six months of this year we’ll be supporting BlackBerry, which we haven’t done thus far. We’re doing better and better in financial services, and companies are saying that they want BlackBerry.

InfoWorld: So if there is one thing you would like to see happen next, what would it be?

Raffel: I’d like to see more companies embracing Microsoft.Net. I think that a lot of the companies that have been embracing .Net are earlier-stage companies. It would be good to see more companies with established installed bases saying, “Microsoft.Net is the way to go.” I think my wish has a pretty good chance of coming true. I think that the whole vision behind Web services is letting a company easily tie together best-of-breed solutions.