The fact that Sage was planning to sell ACT! (and SalesLogix) product lines was predictable, although the actual announcement last Friday still came as a surprise within the industry. Even more of a surprise was that the purchaser was Swiftpage in the USA.
Now the name of Swiftpage will already be familiar to users of ACT!
Swiftpage is a company that provides email marketing services, and at one time produced an ACT! "add-on" which could be downloaded and installed and which then linked Swiftpage with ACT! This enabled ACT! users who signed up to the Swiftpage subscription service to send bulk email to selected groups from their ACT! database through the Swiftpage servers, thus bypassing the problems encountered when trying to send a large number of emails locally.
The integration added an additional Tab to the ACT Contact records which displayed an eclectic variety of additional information in a rather weird way.
The one feature that was actually very useful was the ability to monitor the activities of the recipients of your emails and to score them depending on how interested they appeared to be in the contents of the email received. You could then create a "Call List" based on the top scoring Contacts and then plan a follow up activity to develop their interest.
Sage clearly liked the concept of this additional service that could be connected to ACT! and subsequently integrated the Swiftpage component into the standard ACT! installation, renaming it Sage ACT! Email Marketing along the way.
Seeing such "Connected Services" as a means to quickly provide added features to the core ACT! product for little investment or development work they also partnered with Swiftpage to add a second service, "Sage Business Information Services for ACT!"
Whilst the Email Marketing Service has certainly had some take up, the Business Information Service has been largely ignored. This is partly because whilst its ability to seek out new contacts in specific market sectors is OK, it only works for larger companies, and the killer is that the contact information it does supply doesn't include their email addresses. The other factor is that although this service accesses the Hoovers / D&B database it doesn't offer credit checking which would probably be the largest potential use for this facility.
So, why would a relatively small, email marketing company want to borrow a huge amount of money to purchase a 25 year old Contact Management software package. The two don't seem to be a good fit. ACT! is primarily a piece of software that is sold as a one-off deal and installed locally at the customer's premises. Swiftpage on the other hand is Software as a Service "SaaS"; it is subscription based and it's all hosted by Swiftpage with nothing to install or manage at the point of delivery.
The answer has to be that Swiftpage probably wanted the brand name (and the market that goes with it) and the database of ACT users. Certainly the names of the one to three million current users of ACT! would be useful for Swiftpage to push their email marketing service together with any new services they might develop. But did someone at Swiftpage really wake up one morning and say, "You know what, we should add an installed software product to our product range"? I think not.
No, one way or another, ACT! is heading for the cloud. Of course it is currently quite possible to access your installed ACT! database over the internet or via your smartphone or ipad, but one of the unique selling points of ACT! is the flexibility to install and access your data in the way that works best for your business. Making ACT! purely a service hosted by Swiftpage and sold on a subscription basis would position it alongside the multitude of competitive SaaS CRM services which have been developed from the ground up as internet services with none of the historical baggage of legacy installed software that ACT! brings with it.
One of the ironies of SaaS is that at this point in time, in the UK at least, it that it is best suited to the office environment where a good, speedy, reliable internet service can be almost guaranteed. What looks like one of the strengths of SaaS; providing access to that service and the data it holds when you are out of the office is where it falls down. The fact is that currently, you can't guarantee to get a decent internet connection in the UK when you are on the road. I'm sure that applies to other parts of the world as well.
That's why I use an add-on product, HandHeld Contact to keep my ACT! data on my phone. It's guaranteed to be there instantly when I need it.
Don't get me wrong , the current Sage ACT Premium Mobile product that displays my ACT database on my iPhone is not a bad product, in fact it's rather good, but however good it is I can't guarantee I can access the service when I need it, and I can't work like that.
I know things will change. Internet access will become more ubiquitous and reliable. You can even get WiFi on the London Underground now, providing you're on the right line. So hosted software services are undoubtedly the way a large proportion of the business world is heading and I'm sure we will see a transition in emphasis in the development of ACT! to reflect this.
So what are the challenges for Swiftpage to achieve this? Well porting a piece of software designed for local installation to be a sleek state of the art hosted subscription service will be no mean feat. Perhaps they won't even try. Would developing a leaner, slicker, faster, hosted ACT! from the ground up be a better way to go? Even if a nice new HTML5 interface could be developed, there remains the issue of integrating it with other cloud services. Microsoft has clearly flagged this is where it sees businesses in the next few years, so assuming that we are still wedded to Microsoft Office for the foreseeable future, how do you link a hosted ACT! service to Office 365 in the cloud?
We could also ask what additional complementary services would fit Swiftpage's way of doing business? Well, anything is possible, but I would like to see and integrated VOIP service, and jumping on the Microsoft/Skype bandwagon would be a consistent way to go.
Integrating mapping could also be developed to go beyond Google Maps and Driving Directions to plotting all your ACT! clients in the vicinity and perhaps calculating the most efficient route between them. Producing a mileage report at the end of the day would save your average road warrior another tedious task.
I'm sure social media integration will be somewhere near the top of the list of things to develop, but to be honest, within my own client base I rarely meet anyone who sees any real value in social media integration. If we ever reach a point where we can do lookups and keyword searches within the social forums people may begin to see a value in such a facility.
Anyway, the deal has not yet gone through, but assuming it does ACT! is now ready for a whole new unconstrained chapter in its development and that has to be exciting.
Bring it on. I can't wait to get involved.
For more information about ACT! or for ACT! training visit our web site at www.bigbluemarketing.co.uk
