Anubavam Blogs

Some of the questions, concerns and issues we see facing many companies today include the following:

1. How do I find out what users actually think about my Website, and how does this compare to the competition?
2. Am I using all of the right keywords?
3. Who is visiting my website?
4. How can I reduce the bounce rates from my landing pages?
5. How can I drive more traffic to my site?
6. How effective is my email marketing campaign compared to industry benchmarks?
7. What role should social networks play in my marketing communications plan?
8. Do I use, Facebook, MySpace or YouTube to promote my business?
9. How does the mobile Web work with my website?
10. Is a business blog right for us, and if so, how can I make sure it works?
11. How can I track what blogs are saying about our business and our message?
12. What are my competitors doing online and how should I respond?
13. What is social network marketing and can it help my business?
14. Is my email marketing campaign competitive when compared to industry benchmarks?

We have answers to these questions and ideas to leverage each one of them based on your needs. Our team will help you assess what you are currently doing online, what works, what doesn’t and what you can be doing additionally or differently to attain online market share, brand awareness and revenue . So whether you need help refining your current online strategy or starting over from scratch, Anubavam can help you create a Web strategy that gets great results.

Good news, Chennai and San Antonio have finally inked their Sister City Agreement.  San Antonio’s Mayor Phil Hardberger had announced the Sister City pact back in February of this year, but it has taken until this week to become official with both cities. As you may know Anubavam has corporate offices in San Antonio and Chennai, so this agreement is especially exciting for us.  There are many similarities between the two cities, both are full of regional culture and history as well as thriving medical research and hospital facilities.

We have been really happy with the team that we have been able to put together in Chennai, there are so many extremely qualified developers to choose from.  I believe San Antonio and Chennai will both benefit greatly if they work together.  San Antonio has proven that they can make things happen with their Sister City relationships in Japan and Mexico, so I have no doubt good things will be coming from India.

Although Open Source CRM offerings are but a sliver on the total CRM Market Share pie chart, they are gaining ground. I read an article this morning at CIO.com about a 500 employee, $80 million in revenues, financial services company named IMA Financial Group who dumped their commercial CRM in favor of ConcourseSuite 5.0. They went from a 10%-15% user adoption with their commercial CRM to a 90% user adoption rate with ConcourseSuite 5.0. Those are very dramatic numbers and speak well not only for Concursive , but for open source CRM’s in general. The article also mentioned that H&R Block is a committed Sugar CRM user. That must be why they are so well organized when they do my taxes.

We are big fans of open source and certainly proponents of open source CRM’s. We have developed a service practice around open source CRM implementation and customization, so be sure and visit our site to learn how we can develop a customized open source CRM that’s right for your company. Whether you would like a LAMP based environment, .Net or Java, we have insight and knowledge on the best of breed open source CRM’s available in the market. You can see that based on the Top 10 CRM list below that 50% of the CRM’s are Java based, with .Net getting 20% and LAMP with 20% and then XRMS CRM throws a twist into the mix using PHP, an independent OS and most any kind of network database, so give them a 10% share.

Benefits of open source CRM

• The right to use the software in any way
• No monthly or yearly license fees
• No restriction on number of users
• Customizable for your business
• Flexibility to add/enhance/remove features
• No vendor lock
• Control your own data
• Free version upgrades

“Inside CRM” Top 10 Open Source CRM’s

• SugarCRM Inc.
• SplendidCRM Software Inc.’s
• Concursive (formerly CentricCRM)
• Hipergate
• Compiere Inc.
• Vtiger CRM
• CentraView Inc.
• XRMS CRM
• Cream CRM
• Tustena CRM

Business Blogging is a quick and inexpensive method you can use to get acquainted with your current and future customers in an informal environment, while creating another avenue to you, your company and your brand.

We can assist you in choosing and implementing the right blogging software for your situation and structure it to integrate with your overall On-line Marketing Strategy.

There are 100 times more blogs than there were three years ago, according Sifry’s Alerts’ August post on the State of the Blogosphere.

Adding a blog to your Web site can:

• Connect with potential customers
• drive more traffic to your website (Google, Yahoo, MSN… love blogs)
• permit you to rebut or confirm negative and/or positive press and rumors
• complement or replace your e-newsletter
• expose a human side to the corporate machine
• generate media inquiries
• allow you to post fresh content to your site instantly…no techie expertise needed
• help position you and your company as a thought leader in your market
• be used to peak interest in future products, promotions or projects

RIA, one of the buzz words circling around the Web 2.0 phenomenon, stands for Rich Internet Application. Ask ten people for their definition of RIA and you will most likely get 10 farily different answers. RIA offers traditional desktop application features and functionalities, but the application resides on the web. RIAs combine the reach of the Internet with what you would consider desktop like software features and functionality via a rich and compelling user interface. The goal is to provide a greater level of satisfaction and success in a user’s web-based interactions, be it business or pleasure.

Although the term “Rich Internet Application” was introduced on a white paper published by Macromedia in early 2002, the concept had existed for several years. Companies like Borland (Delphi Pascal) and Microsoft (VB) have supported the RIA type concepts since the 90’s . It is just now that we are really seeing the maturation of RIA, due to technology advancements like being able to access the clients hard drive via the web. Remote Scripting, by Microsoft is another example of a pre RIA technology.

RIAs are also becoming increasingly popular and accepted. According to Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/), mainstream adoption and critical mass among IT and commercial software projects will occur by 2008, and at least 60 percent of new application development projects will include RIA technology by 2010.

The progression and success of Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr and several other fledgling web applications prove that the Rich Internet Application as a computing standard is going to stick around for a while. But beware there are security issues that need to be addressed…we will get into that snake pit on another issue.

Drag & drop, partial screen refresh, cool widgets, 3^rd party integration, add-ons and the use of sliders to manipulate data are just a few examples of RIA functionalities. Allowing off-line use of web applications is another hallmark of RIA technology that is getting more and more attention. Adobe Air and Google Gears are a few of the applications that are giving us the ability to never get off of our computers. Good or Bad Idea…you decide.

Within the RIA environment the client and server computing resources are better balanced. This resource management balancing act frees up server resources, which ultimately enables the server hardware to handle more sessions concurrently.

The network traffic is also reduced significantly by the intelligence of client application since it is only requesting the required data individually and asynchronously.

The following technologies are some of the popular Platforms and Methods being used to build RIA’s:

ActiveX Controls

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flex

Backbase

Curl

Google GWT

JavaFX

JavaScript (Ajax)

Microsoft Silverlight

OpenLaszlo

Welcome to Anubavam’s official blog. Here we will talk about current and emerging technologies, new business strategies, tactics and trends. Please feel free to share your comments.

Thank you.