Wednesday 8 October 2008

Pivotal CRM Sucks

Whilst you might think this title is a little strange for a blog post by someone who makes a living from Pivotal software, but this is was the fourth highest search phrase used by visitors getting to the blog by a search engine.

Admittedly, this phrase has only been used 5 times by my readers (says something about the number of readers I have, poor me!) but I would generally like to know what makes Pivotal suck. 4 of the searches were from USA and one Australian, well their IP addresses are anyway.

Are those 5 disgruntled users who are stuck with a R99 windows client implementation? Have they been forced into using a badly designed system, or is it a genuine gripe about the functionality that Pivotal provide? Maybe someone will make a comment, that I will publish, which will enlighten me and the handfull of other professionals that read this.

Hopefully none of those searching are using Sedna, but would be interesting to find out.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Honestly, I don't even know where to start.

I could gripe about a poor form layout options, expensive licensing costs, lack of community (compared to, say salesforce.com), servers doing unpredictable things, poor upgrade assistance (we're stuck on WAM) and a very click-happy development environment with no source control.

But instead of getting into all of the details, what I can tell you is that our end users don't like the software. They don't like loosing data (which happens regularly) and despite a lot of money, time, and expertise (Piv's pro services), we have yet to solve the issue. Our users regularly try to find ways to not use the software, but because we have built a lot of business value into the app - and can dictate that most of them must use it, few break free.

I compare this to another group we work with. They have a similar, but entirely custom-developed app using 10-year-old web technology. They built it for a fraction of the cost, it requires a fraction of the staff, requires a fraction of the hardware, and has better uptime. And their users absolutely LOVE the app.

PivDev said...

Thanks for your honesty, anonymous. I have never seen a case of lost data before, but I hear you in a couple of other parts, such as lack of community, poor upgrade assistance, and no source countrol.

I have never met any customer, past or present, that have hated the app, be it WAM or Rich. I have met people disgruntled with Pivotal Pro services, as, in my opinion, most of the good ones don't last that long.

Great comment, thanks. At least someone is reading this blog

Anonymous said...

Even I hate pivotal to a lot of extent, In one liner, my job schedule extends just because of the slowness in this crappy product.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the out-of-the-box system, it is completely unusable without extensive customization.

Next they will not support you because your system is customized (Catch-22)

Licensing costs (Pivotal+SQL Server+Win Server+Hardware

Absolutely nowhere to get help beyond the feeble tech support people in India...lack of a customer community.

Servers randomly shutting down, spitting out incomprehensible error messages.

Limited ability to upgrade, performance of Pivotal 6.0 sucks on the desktop!

Regular loss of data (specific to mobile and satellite synchronization)