CDC continues buying up Australian CRM companies -- industry observer
Nadia Cameron has reported that CRM vendor CDC Software has purchased Australian Microsoft CRM specialist, Snapdragon Consulting, CDC's third such buy in 2007.
Snapdragon "will become a subset of CDC's local consulting subsidiary, Praxa," Cameron says, reporting that CDC Chairman, John Clough said Snapdragon's Microsoft CRM expertise would give it a much-needed boost in that market.
"As part of the acquisition, Snapdragon founder and managing director, Guy Riddle, will stay on as general manager of the business and assist Praxa's national operations," Cameron says, adding that "Snapdragon's 12 staff have been retained and are moving into Praxa's Sydney and Melbourne offices."
Clough said "What Guy and his team have in the CRM space is exciting. They have a vertical, specialist operation that offers a lot of synergies with our business. We see a lot of spin-off opportunities for our services and other offerings."
The Snapdragon acquisition comes four months after CDC Software acquired Queensland-based integrator, PlanTec, Cameron says: "At that time, Clough said it was looking to grow Praxa's local revenues from $60 million up to $200 million. It also acquired South Australia-based Vectra Corporation earlier this year."
In late October CDC Software announced that it had added four new products and "enhanced most of the existing products in the Core Productivity Pack of c360," a suite of industry products and development tools for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.
C360’s Core Productivity Pack is being released in conjunction with Microsoft CRM version 4.0. The new products were designed "using customer and partner feedback," CDC officials say, "with a focus on increasing CRM usability, user productivity and user adoption."
The pack for CRM 4.0 now includes four new products -- the c360 Explorer CRM Search Engine which "indexes and organizes all Microsoft CRM records and attachments," and uses Microsoft Office SharePoint search to provide keyword search across CRM and SharePoint, and c360 SharePoint/Microsoft CRM integration which "bridges the gap between Microsoft CRM and SharePoint by enabling automatic creation of a SharePoint site for every required CRM entity," company officials say. Basically it allows CRM and non-CRM users to share the same documents.
There's also c360 Relationship Exploration and Charting, providing an automatic, relationship tree display of all relationships for every CRM record, and the c360 Record Editor, which can edit individual records in any CRM view without opening the individual records using a Microsoft Excel-like editing of CRM records.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.