Mobile Relationship Management (MRM) - A New Era Begins
Posted by mike - 04/20/11 at 05:04 pmI wanted to simply take a moment to comment on the rationale of identifying, naming, and beginning to create another new software category. I promise to keep it short, and the following points represent only a portion of the rationale, but nonetheless are profound from the view of the VIPorbit team in doing so. Mind you, I and a number of people on my team have also done this before in a past era, that is, creating a new category of software before there was the critical mass of users to validate it. Instead, the vision was at that time an instinct against a then hardware-emerging market trend and the software we built supported the vision, and the rest is now history. I am the Co-Founder & Inventor/Designer of ACT!, the product that literally created the Contact Management (CM) category, and which is attributed with being the catalyst in creating the CRM industry. Today, CRM/CM represent an annual multi-billion dollar industry considering the entire ecosystem that supports it.
To further set the stage of explanation, please allow me to describe a whole new and as yet unattended market and market opportunity. Here are some figures to support my claim that come from analyst’s such as Forrester, Gartner, and Mary Meeker (then of Morgan Stanley and now Kleiner Perkins VC firm):
- In the world today there are 5 billion mobile phone users, and nearly 3 billion people who access the internet
- By the end of this year, the number of “smart phone” users of these mobile phones will number 1.4 billion.
- Also, estimates range from 60-100 million tablet users by the end of the year as well (so let’s use 100 million, why not?)
- Excluding any notebook metrics, the smart phone/tablet mobile market by the end of this year will encompass users who have 1.5 billion of these devices - now that’s a pretty big market!
- The current global user base of all CRM and CM products produced by the “Big 7″ (Siebel/Oracle, Salesforce, SugarCRM, and Microsoft CRM on the CRM side; and ACT!, Goldmine, and Maximizer on the CM side) numbers less than 20 million, and I am being generous here. As “big” as Salesforce is thought to be, they only have around 2 million users globally - hardly noticeable, and more so even still with the aggregate of the Big 7 user base against the ubiquitous mobile-device user market thus mentioned
And so, without further elaboration or defense at this point, CRM & CM are just too insignificant to hitch a ride on their meager numbers, much less the category with which them represent. Subsequently, a much bigger, and new, category needed to be identified and named, and so the VIPorbit team has stepped up to do so, and we are calling it Mobile Relationship Management, or MRM. If you think of it as a circle that can contain 1.5 billion items, you can see that 20 million items in the circle can hardly be seen.
With any “category”, there will be later members who today still do not exist to directly appeal to this market of people who are relationship-centric, who want mobile simplicity, who will never be able to be reached by any of the Big 7 because their business models do not support (and come on, they’ve had plenty of time to do so) a new market momentum controlled by the consumer and no longer the enterprise, and who just don’t have the soul of relationship management to appeal to that level or type of user.
And so, beginning with VIPorbit as the first full-function Mobile Relationship Manager designed for these ubiquitous devices beginning with the iPhone, a new era is born. Grab a ringside seat of the birth of software solutions for a whole new class of prospective users at www.viporbit.com. It’s just our beginning, and we and this new category are only going to get stronger from here. And oh yeah, feel free to drop me a line at Mike@viporbit.com. I’ve got a whole lot more to say than this brief blog if you care to engage!
