When every penny counts the more effectively they can be spent the better. That especially holds true for CRM both installations and in support.

 

To that end Knoa is offering full monitoring coverage for SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP CRM 2007. Knoa (News - Alert) also currently offers ‘out-of-box’ monitoring of CRM solutions including previous versions of SAP CRM solutions, Oracle (News - Alert) Siebel CRM, Oracle E-Business CRM, Oracle Peoplesoft CRM, BMC Remedy, Amdocs (News - Alert) and others.

 

Knoa is also a supplying a new End-User Upgrade Planning Service, delivered in conjunction with a deployment of Knoa EPM, which will help companies lower the cost of upgrading, improve upgrade success and shorten the overall upgrade project cycle. The service will accomplish this by enabling the following:

 

--Benchmark application performance and quality prior to an upgrade to establish a baseline for comparison after the upgrade

--Profile utilization patterns to target areas for optimization

--Shorten hyper-care period after application upgrades go-live

 

In citing the need Knoa points to a research report by Forrester Research (News - Alert) “How To Risk-Proof Your CRM Deployment Strategy,” that surveyed business and IT professionals to pinpoint the real-world pitfalls that can trip up CRM initiatives. The report said 33 percent of the problems reported were related to technology, 27 percent to business processes, 22 percent to people, and 18 percent to CRM strategy and deployment.

 

Another Forrester report, “Trends 2010: Customer Relationship Management,” said that CRM buyers are have become very value conscious. Companies are examining whether upgrading the solutions are worth the costs.

 

“CRM systems are one of the most challenging of all enterprise software deployments because so much of the end-user behavior necessary to drive results is essentially voluntary,” said Lori Wizdo (News - Alert), vice president, Marketing, Knoa Software. “All too often, adoption and effective use of CRM functionality is hampered by a below par end-user experience.

 

“Knoa’s end-user experience monitoring gives the IT organization access to real-time metrics to proactively address response time issues while end-user support professionals have immediate visibility into actual user workflow when problems happen. Further, the training organization can pinpoint specific application users that require additional training while process engineering can spot cumbersome workflows and errors that are affecting end-user satisfaction. Finally, the business stakeholders can determine usage concerns, such as who is using which transactions, how long are they active and how long are they idle. All-in-all, Knoa truly offers a 360 degree view of any enterprise’s CRM usage.”