Red Bank, N.J., June 11, 2013 – CoreMatrix^®, a leading cloud computing consulting company, today announced that the manufacturing industry is increasingly adopting cloud solutions not only for back office functions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) but also in the front office to better connect with and focus on customers.

Manufacturers have discovered that cloud computing provides deep functionality and flexibility at a much lower capital and operating cost than traditional on-premise systems. The cloud also offers scalability of data storage as well as computing power on demand, faster upgrades, and guaranteed security of critical customer and internal data by cloud vendors.

“The cloud has enabled collaboration among mobile and remote employees, suppliers, and others in the supply chain through fast and easy access to the data they needed to make informed decisions and optimize operations,” said CoreMatrix Co-Founder, Paul Nix.

Nix also noted that more recently, manufacturers are realizing these same benefits and more in front office cloud applications.

“Customers have more control today due to more product choices, a stronger voice on social channels, and easy access to product information on the Internet,” said Nix said. “In response, manufacturers are implementing cloud solutions for sales, marketing and customer service to participate in social conversations with customers, be more agile in responding to sales opportunities, and gain greater insight and understanding into customer preferences.”

Nix added, “What cloud computing in the front office adds up to is that manufacturers will be able to be closer to their customers, leading to better products and better service.”

For more information about how manufacturing companies are taking advantage of cloud computing, read the new CoreMatrix eBrief, “Manufacturers Expand Their Use of Cloud Computing Solutions.”

About CoreMatrix Systems

CoreMatrix (www.corematrix.com) is a leading provider of cloud computing consulting, systems integration, custom application development, social strategy execution and managed services for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies. With experience gained from more than 1,800 cloud computing engagements, CoreMatrix is dedicated to helping customers achieve their objectives and obtain the greatest value from their investments. Customer examples include: American Express^® Travel Management Services, 20/20 Companies^®, PharmaNet/I3, Wells Real Estate Funds^®, Designer Show Warehouse^®, Transocean, GTECH^®, Bridgestone® and WebMD^®.

• Access to your Community: Ensure the right people have access to your Community. You determine membership through specific profiles or permission sets. If you’re including members outside of your company, you can also use profiles or permission sets to grant them access to the Community.
• Brand and Name your Community: Your Community “look and feel” should be consistent with your brand identity.  Customize your Community to be sure that it is instantly recognizable as your company’s brand. You want customers, partners, and other members to recognize your brand when they enter your Community. Designate a friendly, recognizable domain to ensure it’s memorable and again, consistent with your brand identity.
• What’s Important to your Community: Hone in on the few areas that are important to your Community and limit your tabs to address this information. Select a landing tab that could be most relevant to your Community.  Your other tabs (remember… not too many of them!) should address other specific “sub topics” for your Community.
• Test Drive your Community:  Choose a select group of internal and external constituents to trial your Community and provide feedback prior to launching it.  Not only will this build your relationship with these constituents, but it will also enable you to populate your Community with comments, posts, etc. so that when your Community goes-live, it already has valuable information and demonstrates an “active” Community from launch day.
• Designate a Community Moderator: Select a moderator for each Community you establish.  Moderators are the life-blood of the Community, engaging members and addressing concerns, so be sure that whomever you designate is committed and accountable to engage with the Community on a regular basis.

Jennifer DeLalio, a Senior Project Manager at CoreMatrix and the expert host of the “Tips” webinar series, shares best practices to drive your business forward. Jen takes away the complexity of the newest functionality and enhancements and provides easy-to-follow steps to master Salesforce.

Red Bank, N.J., May 16, 2013 – CoreMatrix^®, a leading cloud computing consulting company, today announced that after examining the storied history and current status of Customer Relationship Management, that the term CRM, the CRM business process, and CRM technology are very much alive and thriving.

CoreMatrix was motivated to study CRM given that CRM had a meteoric rise and then fall in the minds of customers, the media, the market, and vendors, which begged the question: What is the status of CRM today?

For a time in the mid-2000s CRM got a bad name. There were a number of high-profile and expensive mistakes of businesses implementing CRM software, and it led to vendors trying to distance themselves from the term CRM and inventing other terms.

CoreMatrix Co-Founder Paul Nix said, “Many failed implementations were due to poor adoption strategies and unrealistic expectations about what CRM can or should do, and that many of those mistakes have been addressed by vendors who specialize in helping companies successfully implement CRM and embrace CRM as a business strategy and company-wide culture, rather than simply a technology.”

“What hasn’t changed, and is probably one of the chief reasons that CRM has had such a resurgence, is the need to manage customer relationships and the fact that satisfied customers serve as the foundation of every successful company,” Nix added.

Nix also noted that new cloud-based CRM solutions such as those offered by cloud pioneer Salesforce.com have made CRM more affordable, easy to use, and integrated across key front office functions including sales, marketing and customer service.

To read more about CoreMatrix’s findings on CRM and why more and more organizations are eagerly adopting cloud CRM solutions, read the new CoreMatrix eBrief, ”CRM—Dead or Alive?”

About CoreMatrix Systems

CoreMatrix (www.corematrix.com) is a leading provider of cloud computing consulting, systems integration, custom application development, social strategy execution and managed services for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies. With experience gained from more than 1,800 cloud computing engagements, CoreMatrix is dedicated to helping customers achieve their objectives and obtain the greatest value from their investments. Customer examples include: American Express^® Travel Management Services, 20/20 Companies^®, PharmaNet/I3, Wells Real Estate Funds^®, Designer Show Warehouse^®, Transocean, GTECH^®, Bridgestone® and WebMD^®.

What does customer engagement actually mean? There are plenty of definitions out there. But let’s look at this from a customer point of view—because one thing we all have in common is we’re all customers. We want to be listened to, we want to be treated well, we want our needs met. It’s really that simple. The company that can do that is the company that wins our business.

It’s the same thing on the business side: listen to your customers, treat them well, meet their needs. The challenge is how to do this in an online era in which customers are in control: they are tech savvy and mobile, talking about your company and products on social networks, and more willing than ever to shed brand loyalty for another company that . . . listens to them better, treats them better, meets their needs better. The fact is, the Internet, along with social and mobile technologies, has leveled the playing field, making it easier than ever for you to lose a customer to a competitor. Which means the reverse is also true: it’s easier than ever to win a customer—if you engage with them properly.

Customer engagement today means implementing a strategy and tools that enable you to monitor what is being said about your brand, products and services on social networks. You may no longer be able to control the conversation the way you did in the era of push marketing, but you can participate in the social conversation and help to shape its direction by responding appropriately to mentions of your company.

You also need the ability to interact with customers on their terms, meaning they dictate the when and where. For example: offering special deals on Facebook, providing customer service via Twitter, hosting and moderating online discussion forums, and more. It’s all about getting close to customers where they are.

You also need the ability to know everything about your customers, and you need this across your organization. Sales, marketing, customer service, accounting—everyone needs access to a complete view of a customer. Today everyone has to be a customer emissary, and anyone in your organization might be called upon to serve a customer at any given moment. That’s why so many companies are deploying internal social collaboration tools such as Chatter, which allows your employees to seek expertise, information and help from each other when serving a customer.

Is customer engagement a buzzword? Certainly. But you only get to be a buzzword by having at your foundation an important and essential truth: your business will not survive without customers. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed, but how you engage with customers and keep them in the fold continues to shift.

Growth in public cloud services—including infrastructure, platform, software, and security services—continues to be robust. According to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18.6% in 2012 to $110.3 billion and is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 17.7% from 2011 through 2016.[1]

This growth shouldn’t come as a surprise. It represents not just early adopters, but broad industry acceptance of the cloud. CoreMatrix has recently documented cloud computing trends in travel & hospitality, banking & financial services, and healthcare—industries that may not have been the first to cloud computing, but are now rapidly embracing cloud solutions.

The benefits are too powerful to ignore:

• On-demand computing resources that can rapidly scale up or down as needed
• Paying only for the computing resources you use
• Drastically reducing infrastructure and capital costs
• Quick implementation and automatic upgrading of applications
• Alleviating the pressure and demands on your internal IT resources
• Achieving security levels comparable to premise-based or private network solutions

As compelling as these benefits are, there is another reason that organizations everywhere are turning to the cloud: their customers. Because this is the era of customer control.

Customers today have more choices in virtually every product and service category. Customers today are tech savvy and can access a wealth of product information and peer reviews online and through social networks. And customers today take to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others to ask for and make product and service recommendations, to praise and critique their experiences as customers of your company, and to positively or negatively talk about your company.

What does this have to do with the cloud? All of this data about your brand is generated in the cloud. Which means you have an imperative to capture this information by listening on social channels and monitoring mentions of your organization. And you must respond appropriately—all in the name of engaging your customers and managing your brand. That’s probably why Gartner predicts CRM will continue to be the largest global market within software-as-a-service (SaaS), forecast to grow beyond $5B in 2012 to $9B in 2016, achieving a 16.3% CAGR through 2016. And the largest cloud CRM provider is Salesforce.com, a complete sales, marketing and customer service cloud solution.

In the end, so much of the business case for cloud computing comes down to what flows through the veins of every organization and keeps it alive: your customers. Your most precious asset. Who are now engaged in the cloud. Are you?

[1] Gartner: Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update

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Red Bank, N.J., April 23, 2013 – CoreMatrix^®, a leading cloud computing consulting company, today announced that the healthcare industry is increasingly adopting cloud solutions to help meet many of the new IT challenges it faces in an era of healthcare transformation.

Government incentives and mandates are driving every healthcare provider organization—from the smallest medical practices to the largest healthcare systems—to use electronic health records (EHRs). This has created an urgent need for healthcare organizations to manage volumes of data and have at their disposal IT expertise. Both capabilities are signature attributes of cloud solutions.

In addition, the cloud is proving to be a cost effective and secure model for integrating disparate healthcare systems, allowing physicians to share patient data and coordinate care. And as it is in every industry, social media and mobile are having a big impact in healthcare, changing the nature and speed of interaction between consumers and healthcare organizations. Again, the cloud.

CoreMatrix Co-Founder, Paul Nix, said that concerns around data security and patient privacy are quickly going away with cloud solutions. “Many healthcare executives traditionally believed that keeping medical records behind the firewall was the safest choice, but this is no longer the case,” Nix said. “Cloud providers must conform to HIPAA regulations, and many cloud providers specialize in implementing cloud configurations to meet the needs of healthcare.”

Nix also pointed out that cloud benefits such as on-demand computing and scalable storage are extremely attractive to healthcare organizations whose existing IT resources can be quickly overwhelmed by the demands of their industry. He also said that as healthcare organizations continue to embrace social and mobile technologies to connect with consumers and enable provider/patient interaction, the cloud will play an even more prominent role in the healthcare sector.

For more information about how healthcare organizations are finding success with cloud computing, read the new CoreMatrix eBrief, “How Cloud Computing Can Help Healthcare Cure IT Challenges.”   »Read the CoreMatrix eBrief.

About CoreMatrix Systems
CoreMatrix (www.corematrix.com) is a leading provider of cloud computing consulting, systems integration, custom application development, social strategy execution and managed services for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies. With experience gained from more than 1,800 cloud computing engagements, CoreMatrix is dedicated to helping customers achieve their objectives and obtain the greatest value from their investments. Customer examples include: American Express^® Travel Management Services, 20/20 Companies^®, PharmaNet/I3, Wells Real Estate Funds^®, Designer Shoe Warehouse^®, Transocean, GTECH^®, Bridgestone® and WebMD^®.