Pipeliner CRM Kopernikus: True Paradigm Shift in CRM

On September 5, 2018, we will release the new Pipeliner CRM Cloud Version—and I have very appropriately named this version Kopernikus.

Nicolaus Kopernikus was a Polish mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the solar system that placed the Sun at its center, rather than the Earth. The Earth being the center of the universe was the commonly accepted “truth” of the time, until the publication in 1543 of Kopernikus’s book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. Today we understand the magnitude of his discovery.

Just as the release of Kopernikus’s book was a major shift in the view of the universe, the release of Pipeliner Kopernikus is a similarly groundbreaking shift in the CRM marketplace.

Move of a Perfectly Developed Application

This event marks the first time a perfectly developed application has been moved, fully intact, to the Cloud.

Pipeliner was originally developed with a very different technology, Adobe Air, because at the time the technology to support Pipeliner’s innovations was not available on the web. For the last eight years, with input from thousands of users throughout the world, Pipeliner has been fine-tuned to perfection. It is summed up in the term I created: “instant dynamic visualization” and precisely dovetails with the way salespeople actually work. Pipeliner is visual throughout the whole application—in dashboards, reports, accountAccount Account refers to a record of primary and background information about an individual or corporate customer, including contact data, preferred services, and transactions with your company. management, activity management and all other functionality. Often there are even multiple visual approaches to the same task.

Because of the way it has been developed, we already know that Pipeliner will be adopted and used, as we have addressed all the issues that would prevent adoption. So in essence we have moved a ready-made, proven and already adopted solutionSolution Solution is a combination of ideas, strategies, processes, technologies and services that effectively helps an organization achieve its goals or hurdle its challenges. to the Cloud.

The Need for Change

Our hybrid approach—both online and offline—offers the best of both worlds. For a salesperson constantly on the road, it means that the CRM can be utilized whether or not internet access is available. It also offers high security, because much of the time the userUser User means a person who uses or consumes a product or a service, usually a digital device or an online service. is offline.

That said, we knew we would ultimately need to bring Pipeliner completely to the Cloud due to several limitations. The primary limitation was that the productProduct Product refers to anything (an idea, item, service, process or information) that meets a need or a desire and is offered to a market, usually but not always at a price. required a download, which could be complicated for some large companies. Pipeliner had to be downloaded onto each computer. Even with an application that automatically distributed the download, it could sometimes be cumbersome, due to firewalls and other barriers. This download isn’t necessary with a web application.

History has shown us, and most people would argue that moving to the web meant that we should build an entirely new product. I disagreed because the best move we could make was to take an application that already has high usability, and is loved by many users around the world, and move it feature-for-feature to the web. The good news is that the web has now many more capabilities than it did only a few years ago, and it is now possible to visualize and execute the move to the Cloud.

Transfer in Phases

This tremendous task was done over four years, and the transfer done in different phases.

• The first phase was the bringing of the whole reporting engine into the Cloud (this is the most flexible reporting engine in the whole CRM industry—not only with standard reports, but also with pivot report and advanced reporting capabilities).
• We then released Performance Insights as a Cloud-only feature.
• We’ve switched to a more robust, scalable database.
• We now have 4 dataData Data is a set of quantitative and qualitative facts that can be used as reference or inputs for computations, analyses, descriptions, predictions, reasoning and planning. centers in the AWS Cloud: Australia, Europe, Canada and the US.
• The remainder of the entire system is now being moved to the web with Pipeliner Kopernikus.

Every Major Issue—Fully Handled

To sum up, Pipeliner Kopernikus addresses every major issue that a CRM solution encounters:

• Usability and adoption. Through our careful development over the last four years, we’ve created a proven CRM solution that has been adopted globally, and will continue to be so. This proven and perfect application is now being moved wholly intact to the Cloud.
• Beyond CRM, we’ve created, with SalesPOP, a platform to help educate salespeople and make them better at their jobs.

Suffice it to say, Pipeliner Kopernikus is what we’ve all been working toward for the last four years. This is the one that will push us over the top.