The future of Nimble is blue – Azure blue.

The News

This is not about the colour of hope (which is blue, at least, if you are a German, like me), but about the long pending final migration of Nimble to Azure. The company announced on May 22 that it has successfully migrated its leading SaaS Social Sales application from Amazon Web Services to Azure. According to the press release this migration was accomplished in less than four weeks without impact on Nimble customers or, as the press release stated “without a hitch”. With this move Nimble can now “tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem to scale”. According to the press release the company reports that, Microsoft being “a global Nimble reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office 365, demand for the easy-to-use CRM for small workgroups is surging”. Then there are two further interesting pieces covered in the press release. For one: with this move Nimble also “accelerates the delivery of its upcoming 5.0 release using the Azure Platfrom as a Servce (...) and by integrating Common Data Services, Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow”. Nimble 5.0 shall deliver a “company wide team relationship manager that unifies contacts from siloed departments in sales, marketing, customer service, and accounting for Office 365 and G Suite users”. The release of Nimble 5.0 is targeted for June 2019. Second, Nimble emphasizes on the power of ecosystems by putting a spotlight on Nimble being the only ISV on Microsoft’s CSP Cloud Solution Provider marketplace that uses CSP to build a global distribution channel. Nimble does this by first helping to transform the resellers so they can transform their customers more easily and knowledgeable. “Partners reselling third-party solutions like Nimble with Office 365 can take advantage of solution bundles entirely integrated within Microsoft’s provisioning and transaction system”. Nimble states that to date nearly 500 CSPs are using Nimble internally. This approach helps resellers to transform from being sellers of products, functions and features, to becoming sellers of business solutions based upon Office 365.

The Bigger Picture

From its origins Nimble is a solution for small businesses that targeted at replacing the Inbox as the company “CRM” system. I put CRM in quotes as the term gets increasingly confused with Sales Force Automation (SFA). Nimble is an SFA system. But this is not the real point. The point being that by moving to Azure, Nimble now is prepared to address larger teams, too, and is therefore moving up the ladder a few notches. At the same time, the CRM market has morphed from an applications market to a platform and ecosystems market with four strong infrastructure players: Alibaba, AWS, Google, Microsoft, in alphabetic order. To read more about what a platform is, refer to my last year’s but still current article. In my Clash of Titans series of posts I have also discussed these four players. At the same time there are software vendors striving for winning dominance in this platform market. There are the tier one vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. I covered these four here and here. And then there are a number of smaller players, notably Zoho and Freshworks that have the ability to undercut and disrupt the tier one vendors as they have the advantage of scaling up from an SMB market as opposed to being in the need to scale down from an enterprise market. And in between we have players like BPM or Pega, to name but two (I apologize to all the other ones that I didn’t mention. Contact me if you are interested). A strong platform play means being strong on the four dimensions

• Technical Platform, covering IaaS and PaaS
• Ecosystem
• Insight
• Productivity

All these players have recognized these dimensions and have different strengths and weaknesses towards with they are playing their game.

My Analysis and PoV

After this brief detour let’s get back to some more specifics. As the CRM market has morphed from an applications market to a platform market, the move of Nimble to Azure is a strong case of a win-win-win situation for Microsoft, its channel partners, and of course, Nimble. It provides help for Microsoft in an increasingly saturated enterprise market while a large number of SMBs literally still runs on Excel and E-Mail. Microsoft Dynamics is fairly hard to implement – as every enterprise scale CRM system is. With the help of Nimble the entry barrier goes down by first having a very easy-to-implement system that then can naturally grow into MS Dynamics, e.g. by using a pre-customized version from Nimble. At the same time, Microsoft becomes a strong player at the lower end of the SMB market by virtue of the ecosystem it created and runs. As Office applications are run throughout the world, this can potentially create a strong barrier for the other players, including the ones that still focus on the SMB market. As a side effect, Microsoft gets more application load onto Azure, which is the currency of the IaaS market. Channel partners can grow on two dimensions. At the minimum, they have another arrow in their quiver. But by being smart they can convert themselves from mere tool vendors to business solution vendors by providing bundled solutions that utilize the strength of Azure and important apps like Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, and Common Data Services. By using the software themselves, they can lend credibility to this concept. The beauty of this is, that the ecosystem partners help each other grow, therefore growing the ecosystem as a result. This is a prime example of what makes an ecosystem strong. As for Nimble, it is obvious. More partners using the software means more users. More partners selling it means the potential of exponential growth. With a deep integration into the Office 365 stack and nifty tools like the sidebar that can get used almost anywhere to create or update a Nimble record Nimble has the serious ability to become sticky. It adds immense value to the users and I am constantly surprised that the other vendors do not have something comparable – apart from possible concerns about GDPR-like regulations. It worked before. As Jon doesn’t get tired to say he is following the same strategy that made his earlier venture Goldmine so successful: Build a solution that users want and integrate it deeply into the Microsoft stack. Grow from there. I do not see a reason why it should not work again.  

The News

In the past few weeks there have been two interesting announcements by Nimble. First, on June 14, 2018 Nimble announced a partnership with Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics VARs in North America. Velosio and Nimble entered into a global reseller agreement. As a part of this agreement Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365. Velosio is the latest prominent name in among the growing number of Microsoft/Nimble partners. One week later, on June 20, 2018 Nimble announced a revamp of its application homepage with the Nimble Today page. This dashboard page gives the user a clear and customizable view of their sales pipeline, calendar appointments, tasks and social signals with relationship insights directly embedded in the widgets. As a start the page offers 6 widgets

• Deals
• Events
• Tasks
• Highlighted Contacts
• Signals
• Stage Funnel

that can get freely rearranged. The Today Page is also available for iOS users now and will be available to Android users soon.

The Bigger Picture

The enterprise CRM market is saturated. There are at least 4 tier one players for every major CRM function that are competing for supremacy. Customer demands have evolved from requiring transactional applications to getting high value solutions that allow the delivery of high-end customer (and user) experience. The market itself has morphed from a suite market to a best-of-breed application market, and now to a platform and ecosystem market. In this market it is important to excel in two, maybe three areas:

• Platform as a Service (PaaS). The platform itself must support current and future technologies that enable the fast and easy creation of value through applications that are developed within its ecosystem
• A broad ecosystem. This creates the reach and relevance that is necessary to become and remain a relevant player in the enterprise software market.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). While IaaS in itself is a commodity, it can become an asset when it is combined with a strong application platform (PaaS) and ecosystem. The right combination affords the tremendous opportunity to provide (anonymized) data for machine learning models that can then provide value to all customers

This is exactly the chance for young and hungry SMB players with enterprise ambitions like Zoho or Freshworks to become significant players, to name just two. The risk for enterprise software makers is to be disrupted from below – similar to what Salesforce did to the Oracle’s and SAP’s of the world when CRM was still more of a suite game turning into a cloud-based best-of-breed application market. The big players have understood this. All of them. And they are pursuing different strategies to achieve, maintain, or protect their respective leadership positions.

My PoV and Analysis

Microsoft is one of these contenders. With the help of Nimble, Microsoft has one of the stronger strategies in the field. Here is why, coming from the Nimble perspective. I will write about Microsoft’s side when I refresh my Clash of Titans article. It’s been almost two years since I wrote it and all vendors have moved enough to warrant this update. So stay tuned. But I digress; so let’s get back to our topic. Nimble’s latest partnership with Microsoft channel partners, as well as the revamp of what I would call their app home page, cater to the needs of, but not only, small businesses. They also show that Nimble is quickly maturing as a valuable part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Partnerships like the one with Velosio are a tremendous growth opportunity for Microsoft, Velosio, and Nimble, because they provide high value to their joint customers. This can potentially have a very good impact on Nimble’s growth figures and give Microsoft quite an edge in the contest for winning the race for the fast growing SMB CRM business. Following my definition of a CRM system as an enabler of the marketing, sales, and service pillars, I still wouldn’t name Nimble a CRM system; but then contact management, account management and SFA are some of the core challenges facing every business, especially the smaller ones. So, with the Nimble partnership Microsoft has a solid and credible foot in the SMB CRM market. That foothold is solid and credible for two reasons. First, because both Nimble and Microsoft have strong, smart ecosystems plays and because Nimble’s functionality is maturing at a rapid pace. Nimble is an important entry point for fast-growing companies into the Microsoft ecosystem. Because Nimble can enrich Dynamics profiles and deliver them in the browser, in Office 365 and on social media, these companies can grow via Nimble into the Dynamics suite of software. Second, because Nimble is hungry. The company is essentially following the successful strategy of Goldmine, Jon Ferrara’s earlier CRM play. This includes partnering with Microsoft and partnering with a range of high profile resellers while providing helpful functionality. This is evidenced by both recent announcements: the strong ecosystem play that Nimble is pursuing by partnering with Microsoft, and its announcement regarding the new Today Page. Providing this dashboard seems to signify a move away from the focus on Social Media that was seen until now. This dashboard page makes the application a bit more mainstream but at the same time gives users what they need and want – support for outreach beyond social media. Now, after all this raving, I have some suggestions for Nimble on how to become even better. Although Nimble relies a lot on Azure there could be more usage of Azure’s machine learning/AI capabilities. This holds true especially for lead scoring and opportunity scoring. Providing enabling functionality like this becomes increasingly important with the complexity of deals handled. The goal is to provide even more value to sales representatives and their managers by indicating which customers and opportunities to focus on. Companies like Clari are showing the way here. Salesforce and SAP have solutions for this, too. Azure offers the technology – and Nimble already collects the data for providing pre-learned models that can be optimized for its customers. This sounds like a clear win-win situation to me.

It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other. Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any  other smaller vendor tools. The logical next step is to … … integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365.  I already speculated about this in my February post: Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too expensive and too ‘clumsy’, user-unfriendly. Add the idea of a deep integration into the Office Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the sudden there is a powerful and affordable social sales and marketing solution for Microsoft Office365 users.Mind you, there still would be gaps on the service, especially on the marketing side, but this is a story for another day. For now I do see huge potential in this partnership. And unsurprisingly, this is exactly what Jon and his team did over the past three months. With this new integration the Nimble Smart Contact Manager comes up within all Office 365 productivity and business applications, plus Outlook, Skype, Teams, and etc., giving users the rich contact information that Nimble gather in real time. This is fully in line with Jon’s vision of Nimble “becoming the world’s individual and teams’ simple, smart and social contact manager”.

My Take

This is Big, for both parties! The E-Mail inbox is still the most widely used de facto contact manager. There are estimations that more than 80 percent of companies worldwide do not use any contact manager or CRM application at all. With this step of integrating deeper into the MS fabric, Nimble comes far closer to Jon’s vision by getting access to a huge number of potential business users who need just a bit more than just e-mail and for whom Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is too expensive and too clumsy, or just plainly not useful to people with simple needs. By staying connected to Google, Nimble rides on the two most prevalent e-mail platforms. But what’s in it for Microsoft, you ask? Microsoft, as the other Enterprise CRM vendors (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, etc.) face increasing pressure by vendors that started off by addressing the SMB market, especially the lower end of it. Salesforce itself concentrated first on smaller companies or departmental solutions that brought them a foot in the door. With this sales approach, based upon the subscription and cloud software models, they disrupted the market – and moved on to become an enterprise player. SAP is clawing its way down with different solutions that target smaller companies than their usual clientele. Microsoft so far did the same upward move that Salesforce did. The origins of Microsoft’s business applications (Axapta and Navision) have been SMB-oriented. Now they are targeting Enterprises, of which there are only so many. SugarCRM currently moves similarly. In brief, these vendors are vulnerable to aggressive SMB vendors like Zoho and others, which can disrupt them from below. Microsoft needs a solution to address this vulnerability. In comes Nimble to add simple social sales and marketing to Office365. At a reasonable price point, Nimble is likely to provide eighty to ninety percent of the functionality that small company salespeople need to grow their business. And this in a very usable way, automating a lot of the data gathering in the background. Not having to collect this data and enter it manually into the contact database adds immediate value. In comparison to learning to ride a bicycle, Nimble “will be like the training wheels” to Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator says Jon, “we will onboard millions of people to Microsoft Enterprise Apps and many will not need more than that”. In summary, Microsoft gains the ability to attract a lot of smaller companies that might otherwise consider another vendor’s CRM, to their platform. With the foot in the door, Microsoft then has the possibility to easily upgrade these customers to Dynamics365 business applications. Let’s see what the next steps are in this partnership. It has the potential to be very symbiotic. It also has the potential of Nimble becoming Microsoft’s entry solution to CRM.