On Demand and On Premise CRM Solutions – A Comparison

Customer relationship management solutions have proven their importance in business management; and are now the most demanded solutions for any type of businesses. New improvements are taking part in existing solutions and new solutions are introduced day by day. Some vendors are now specializing in some specific industries, while most others are making their presence felt across industries by offering more customization features. The inflation of CRM solutions also created a dilemma in small business managers’ minds; they are still confused to choose that or this. As like any other product one purchases, CRM solutions are to be selected after considering many different things including cost, suitability, technical advancement, technical knowledge required, features it offer, additional features and add-ons, data security, employee adoption, open-source nature, etc. A wrong choice may result in tremendous business loss; and a right choice can develop your business in to new levels. When we consider the above things, we can find that almost all of them are related to the basic CRM classification, On Demand and On Premise CRM solutions. When it come to cost, on demand and on premise systems are contradict to each other. On demand CRM solutions do not need any large upfront investment as there only require a monthly usage fee per user; no database or internal network set-up, no update or maintaining costs. On premise CRM solutions on the other hand requires huge upfront investment for purchasing and implementing software, they need maintenance, periodical update and manual or instructed data backing-up. So on demand solutions suit businesses with limited users and on premise solutions suit those with more predicted CRM users. Suitability of a CRM solution depends mainly upon its customizable ability. On demand solutions are known for their customizable and ready-to-go features. They require not much technical knowledge to implement and are reported to have very high user adoption rates. They are blessed with powerful vendor managed features that a user without technical knowledge can bend to fulfill his needs. On the other hand on premise solutions require month or even years of time to implement is effectively, they require the assistance of at least one person with good knowledge about software implementation, network administration, data management and software modification. The features which an organization requires on its CRM solution depend on the industry and business type. The CRM need for a retail store will be much different from a software delivering firm. Good CRM solutions are those which automate all business processes which goes on in an organization, which can report the status of each processes, which let users to analyze specific tasks, which enable users to manage hot relationship with customers, and which let users to create plan for future. Both on demand and on premise solutions are almost similarly powerful in here; but difference lies among systems and vendors. On demand CRM solutions may have an upper hand as they need no manual update and are with availability or more open-source solutions. The next most important thing is data security. Here on premise solutions leads; as they do not require any distant data hosting or inter-company data sharing, at least in theory. On demand CRM vendors are also improved data security, especially in last 2 year or son, with much more improved data encryption techniques and trusted data hosting.