DM p38-40 Software Feb09.qxp 29/01/2009 13:09 Page 40
Software Review
Campaign planning
lets you set dates and
ascribe values to
campaign costs and
so forth for future
reporting.
Blind to consumers tions, was adequate at peak times, as it should be
After various problems at the likes of Amazon and given the typically small databases the package works
Apple left American on-demand users without their with – storage area is on the diminutive side at sales-
applications or their data, the question over whether force. With a limit of 1Gb for all users (not just one)
a company should rely on this kind of infrastructure it wouldn’t take too many big files to swallow that
for critical applications remains unanswered. Though up, something to think about if you wanted to use
its Sun/Oracle back end is very robust. Salesforce has the system to underpin proofing workflow. Extra stor-
had its own outages and security lapses (though not age is pricey too though third parties like Appirio do
recently). The overall cost of ownership is also a have cheaper solutions.
A pre-integrated AdWords
strong concern, with per-user charges rising to over The much-vaunted AppExchange will be of interest
functions allows the
construction of simple
£2000 annually in the unlimited edition of the appli- to marketers, mostly because they will need many of
Google AdWord adverts cation. That’s a lot to ask for what’s on offer here. the tools offered there to get the marketing function-
and allows for compliance
Response speed, a problem for some SaaS applica- ality the standard package lacks like FTP, decent col-
checking.
laborative working, data manage-
ment tools, full campaign manage-
ment and so forth. There are hun-
dreds of other business applica-
tions to choose from too, if you
don’t mind being tied into a pro-
prietary development environment
and hosting platform.
Salesforce offers the bare bones
of what most midrange marketers
might need, especially the b2b
users that it was originally created
for. But it remains overwhelmingly
sales-focused and expensive, with
tiny standard storage and is far too
occupied with its own little foibles
like the mostly-irrelevant “Ideas”
functions. Those wanting to han-
dle campaigns of any size with fine
control in multiple channels will
need to add a lot of extra modules
from AppExchange, or more likely,
end up looking elsewhere.
n
40 Database Marketing February 2009 www.dmarket.co.uk
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