Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Who Will Actually Benefit from Entellium’s Demise?

Now that the Entellium situation has begun to slow down in Seattle I ask the question, who will actually benefit from the unfortunate events at Entellium? There are many employees left standing outside after the massive layoffs and there are a lot of businesses and organizations who fear the safety of their data, wondering if the software they use to manage their business will just be turned off one day, there was already a brief period last week where the Entellium web site was down. Theories have been flying around the web of what will come of Entellium employees and customers, Avidian’s Founder and CEO James Wong expressed interest in purchasing some of Entellium’s assets. Meanwhile CRM vendor Salesboom.com issued a formal release aimed at Entellium’s Employee’s and Customers with a “Rescue Initiative”. This rescue initiative invited laid off Entellium’s staff to send their resumes to Salesboom.com for possible employment. Also in the release Salesboom.com offered free accelerated data migration to Entellium customers.

These are just two hints as to what may come of Entellium but I want to look at the reality of the situation outside of the offers to purchase Entellium assets. To start here is a list of the companies best situated to benefit from the Entellium fiasco; Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Salesboom.com, ACT!, and Microsoft. These are some of the top CRM vendors in the market today and can all take on Entellium customers. There hasn’t been much mentioned from Salesforce, Netsuite, Microsoft or ACT! regarding these events; all I noticed is that Salesforce has purchased Entellium as an adword to ensure those seeking Entellium find Salesforce. What I find most interesting is that no one has mentioned ACT! as an organization who stands to gain many of Entellium’s customers since a lot of those customers moved to Entellium from ACT! ACT! has made their business on SMBs by providing contact management solutions and SMBs are what made up the majority of Entellium’s customers. I see a problem with Entellium customers moving to ACT! they will not be receiving a true on demand multi tenant CRM solution which they could receive from Salesforce, Netsuite or Salesboom.com.

A quick look at the other CRM vendors; Salesforce is almost always considered when businesses are looking for CRM which makes me think that for some reason Entellium customers have already evaluated Salesforce and for whatever reason decided to go with Entellium instead. Looking at Microsoft, this giant is a new comer to the CRM world, although they have the resources to develop a great CRM I believe they are still too far behind the game with their CRM inside Outlook approach. Netsuite is another large company who has its roots in ERP which shines through to their CRM, I find Netsuite’s CRM to lack some of the features that Salesforce and Salesboom have. With this reasoning I am not surprised with Salesboom.com’s efforts with their Rescue Initiative positioning themselves directly in front of Entellium customers. Where ever Entellium customer land I’m sure CRM vendors will be more than happy to welcome them.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor Entellium customers. They have to deal with the headache and costs of data and business process migration, re training, etc

No matter who they choose to go with next, Salesforce.com, Netsuite, ACT! or Salesboom.com, this is very unfortunate for hundreds of businesses.

Anonymous said...

Salesboom just used this as a PR stunt to gain exposure, as did Avidian. Neither of them are truly interested in helping out. Several former employees have reached out to Salesboom to see what their plane is, and all have been brushed aside. This will all be forgotten soon enough and everyone will just move one. There were not enought customers at Entellium to really worry about their fate anyway.

Josh Whiting said...

Anonymous, As I do appreicate comments on my blog I must strongly disagree about there not being enough customers at Entellium to worry about their fate. If they only had 5 customers it would be enough to worry about as these are real business owners with real families, even if not all Entellium customers were real... I would also wonder what your source is which stated that Salesboom had brushed aside former Entellium employees as their press release had good intentions.

Anonymous said...

Josh, I have to agree with anonymous, I am one of the former Entellium employees that submitted my resume to salesboom with the supposed "rescue plan" in place and I have yet to hear a response. A colleague friend of mine spoke with them and all salesboom was interested in was finding out the name of the top sales person, and that they "would only be hiring 1 or 2 people." Some rescue plan, especially when many of us were ready to go with a possible expansion office in Seattle.

Also, as a sales rep for the company, let me tell you that Salesboom RARELY came into competition, and this is a total PR stunt with no intention of helping anybody but themselves. You were only in maybe 2 of my deals in nearly 2 years.

Anonymous said...

It's people like the ex-CEO and ex-CFO of Entellium that give online CRM providers a bad reputation. I hope Entellium clients don't get too spooked and jump back into ACT! or another on-premise CRM.

Anonymous said...

Salesboom did a press release that was absolutely ridiculous! I would be surprised if even one Entellium customer goes to salesboom at all. Not without having a discussion or a look at their financials. Salesboom claims revenues of $66 Million a year - Please customers of Entellium ask for their audited financials otherwise you are going to be in the same predicament.

These customers are going to look at public entities like MS CRM, Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Best Software (who owns ACT!) - the premium price is worth it and they will realize it.

As for salesboom (which is out of Halifax NS), I think they are not going to gain anything out of this!! Unless ofcourse they buy business (like the enticement program! which is going to drain their cash flow). As for hiring employees of Entellium, I would be surprised if Salesboom hired even any of Entellium's contract employees not to mention pay them a base salary. The premliminary indicators are that Salesboom was just fishing for account information by dangling a carrot

Even though the CFO and CEO were idiots, the Entellium sales folks are smart and I will gaurantee you that not even one of these folks will go work for Salesboom....

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