Thursday 8 November 2007

Small World

Even though the Pivotal product is not widely used, it still surprises me how small a world is, well in the UK anyway. I often here about developers / consultants moving between companies, companies moving between consultancies but there still is not a lot of new customers (to my knowledge).

This is a worry, for a consultant like myself, with the knowledge that your key skill has a limited number of clients. I have always been critical of
Pivotal's marketing strategy. Pivotal should be capitalising on it's key selling points - flexibility and stability. When Pivotal is installed at a customer site, the clients I have spoken to love it. It can do all they want, with the ability to expand to all they will need. Can you say that about MS CRM / Siebel etc?

I think Pivotal have missed a trick here, and hope (selfishly) that they start getting more clients soon. I know
Sedna will hopefully be a huge step forward but please Pivotal, open the purse for some decent marketing.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Very interesting blog.
Keep posting!

I think that Pivotal shold pull more resources for community support - the customers and the consultants. Look for MS - there are lot of websites, blogs, forums and knowledge sources about MS CRM. I hope there will be more for the Pivotal CRM, because as for now it's very poor supported area.

Best regards,
Marcin Kwiecinski
www.pivotalcrm.info

VenkatR said...

Hi,

Not kowing where to post this here it is as a comment... :)

Do you know if Pivotal can expose a read only view of its data so that other applications can access this view for further processing.

Since Pivotal does not recommend to touch the DB would this result in any kind of problems?

Your inputs shall be helpful.

PivDev said...

itzzz me....!! (great name by the way)

As Pivotal is based on a MS SQL (or Oracle) there is nothing stopping you doing read only stuff directly at the database, using SQL statements etc.

Only problem with updating / adding data is that you need to use the Pivotal tools, such as webservices, Appserver or something else. This way, the records all get the right IDs and the ANM (to sync to users / satellites) are aware of the change.

VenkatR said...

aw....dint find any name that blogger would accept and thus was born itzzz me!

anyways, firstly appreciate your time in replying back to me.

So, you are saying that it is not a problem in creating a read only view of a particular table say a customer table of the ED, and exposing this read only view to another application?

I always thought that any DB "touch" is a definite NO from Pivotal's side. Please correct me if I am worng here.

PivDev said...

You certainly can create a view from a Pivotal table.

It is a no no officially, but there is no harm as long as you are doing read-only stuff. If you are wanting to edit or create you will have to use the Pivotal applications

VenkatR said...

Thank you once again.