Inside ASI-AP

My recent post on the wave of non-profit solutions built on CRM packages being over generated some interesting real-life feedback from one of our US sales exec, as copied below. While this example is specific to Pivotal, we hear similar stories from other CRM platforms.

At a recent US tradeshow I had an informative discussion with the IT Director from a large regulatory body/association that selected a highly customized Pivotal based CRM solution over iMIS about 4 years ago. This was a ~ $300K+ iMIS software opportunity. Pivotal was chosen at the time due its more sophisticated and flexible toolkit for creating custom workflows and screen designs.

The IT Director explained to me that they've been told by Pivotal that there is no real upgrade path from the existing client/server version to their next generation .NET product. Apparently there is a key technology called "agents" in the client/server version that allowed clients to create custom extensions to Pivotal without modifying the core application's source code. This customer relied heavily on agents to customize the generic Pivotal application to meet their 'unique' needs, to the extent that they now have over 1,000 such 'agents' in place. They are very happy with the current functionality and performance of their system, however, because the technology to provide the customization functionality is totally different in the next version of Pivotal, each agent will have to be completely re-written, at an estimated cost of (get this) $ 3,000 per agent....

So this organization is now looking at an upgrade cost as much as $ 3,000,000 to move to the next version of Pivotal. Needless to say, they are interested in reviewing iMIS again to see if it may be a more appropriate solution!