ResortCom’s Marxer says the integration of the RightNow on-demand software with his back-office system is satisfactory, but not what he would call ideal. "RightNow delivered on all the integration points we needed and the performance was reasonable," he says. But to open up a customer incident report, which an employee does only when an incident cannot be resolved on the first contact, takes 10 seconds because of the back and forth on the back end. That’s just fine for ResortCom’s needs at the moment, but "there’s some room for improvement," he says.

Mike Davis, CIO of Stewart Information Services, agrees. Like Slusar at SunGard, Davis had to think about the needs of the far-flung sales and customer-service organization supporting the $2.2 billion title-insurance company he works for. With a requirement that the software eventually support at least 4,000 and as many as 8,000 users, Davis had the option of becoming one of Salesforce.com’s largest customers to date (in fact, small pockets of people within the company had already started using Salesforce.com on their own). But unlike Slusar, Davis ultimately purchased a license for Onyx’s on-premise CRM product.

Davis wanted to tie the CRM to all of Stewart’s "day-in and day-out" systems. "We needed the most flexibility we could get in integrating it," says Davis. "And [Onyx] seemed to have much easier ways [than Salesforce] to integrate our system with theirs and theirs with ours—three different levels of embedding and exposing the information. There were modules of code available to use within our systems to make it easier."

Salesforce.com also has ways to get data in and out of Stewart’s applications, in an import-export fashion, Davis says. But it would have required users to manually initiate the imports and exports in a less-seamless fashion than he would have liked. "We might have been able to make it work," says Davis. "But it wouldn’t be very efficient. And it wouldn’t have made for a very good user experience."

Easy for You, Difficult for Me

One of the major selling points for on-demand CRM is its relative ease of implementation, particularly in contrast to the expensive and lengthy rollouts that have plagued the traditional CRM customer.

Indeed, at Qosina, the Microsoft on-premise implementation took more than a year. And the biggest cost was consulting fees, which, at $280,000, made up half of the implementation expenses. Davis of Stewart Information Services is just finishing his Onyx pilot (for six sales-force units), which also required the added expense of two full-time and two part-time consultants. It took seven months longer than expected because midway through the process, Davis discovered some additional functionality that would be needed for the regional sales offices.