New BI and CRM Evaluations

At TEC, we recently launched several new knowledge bases for comparing and analyzing software vendors and products. I’ve noticed a number of new sites in the recent past that are attempting similar tools to TEC’s evaluation system. I plan to write a little about these shortly. But for now, I thought I’d put the word out that our CRM and business intelligence (BI) segments expanded considerably.

Our BI analyst refined the research so that we now model, on the one hand, business intelligence systems, and on the other hand business performance management systems. It seems like those two areas were not previously well-distinguished, in part because the applications share a lot of common functionality. Hopefully these new BI & BPM evaluation centers will help users better understand how to select and employ these applications. We have evaluation data for a number of well-known vendors such as Oracle | Hyperion and Applix, but I’d like to include some open source apps, like Pentaho, in our knowledge bases.

In addition, our CRM analysts not only improved our model of CRM applications but also branched out a new model of sales force automation (SFA) systems. We already let users analyze their requirements for SugarCRM. Perhaps as demand for open source CRM products increases, other FOSS vendors will want a chance to be introduced in a fair way alongside their proprietary competitors.