CRM Business Cloud Computing

Xun Liang
School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China

xliang@ruc.edu.cn
cloud becomes largely convenient at a lower cost and realizes the
functions of data sharing and exchanging [2]. A user of business
cloud is provided with the opportunity not only to avail of the
various utilities from the business cloud, but can also to reduce its
business cost. It is reasonable to assume that the business cloud
users do not need to invest to establish its eBusiness hardware and
software systems nor have its own system and database as long as
it chooses the services of the cloud. In other words, with business
cloud, the users may expeditiously establish their eBusiness
systems, as opposed to purchasing hardware and software. Clearly,
business cloud is a new version of eBusiness.

ABSTRACT
In this paper, cloud and business cloud are reviewed. The
summaries of several important business cloud providers and their
products are presented. We design a concrete system for the
customer relationship management (CRM) cloud as an example of
business cloud. Finally, future issues are discussed.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

K.6.1 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]:
Project and People Management

The services in the business cloud can be divided into three tiers,
namely, (1) software as a service (SaaS), (2) platform as a service
(PaaS), and (3) infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In the first tier,
the applications provided by business providers are run on a cloud,
and can be accessed through a variety of devices, e.g., Web
browsers, cellulous phones, and iPod. The users do not have to
concern themselves with managing and controlling the cloud
fundamental devices, such as networks, servers, operating systems,
storages, and business systems. Instead, they only need to
configure a few user-friendly parameters. In the second tier, the
business cloud service users may obtain coding tools with
provided languages on the cloud, and do not have to know where
these networks, servers, operating systems, and storages are
located, and how they work. Nonetheless, the users still have to
configure the application environments. In the third tier, the cloud
is able to supply users with custom-built computing, storage, and
networks. Users may run their own business software on cloud
without having to manage any cloud devices. The only work that
users should do is to command the operating systems, perform
storage procedures, and accomplish the deployment [3].

General Terms
Design.

Keywords
Cloud computing; Business cloud; Cloud providers; CRM cloud.

1. INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is developed based on areas such as grid
computing, distributed computing, parallel computing, etc. Given
that cloud computing has much more powerful computation
ability compared with the traditional networks, scholars have
argued that cloud computing is a revolutionary computing model.
Cloud computing is characterized by obtaining according to
necessity. When users desire to operate with large computational
needs, it is not necessary to purchase the extra computer hardware
and software for one-time usage. Instead, they connect to the
cloud. With the cloud connections, they rent the virtually
unlimited and inexpensive computing resources somewhere on the
cloud, thus, significantly reducing costs. On the other end of the
cloud, the computing resource providers offer the cloud services
to the user. One advantage of using cloud is the reduced concern
about data loss or virus intrusion because the cloud provides
considerably safer and more reliable data storage hardware [1].

Typical business clouds in applications are as follows: (1) sales

automation clouds comprising activity management, area
management, forecasting, cellulous phone access, email, and
online data analyzing as well as mining application systems for
increasing sales efficiencies and incomes; (2) service and
technical support clouds containing the solutions for enterpriseoriented users; (3) partner clouds which are fundamental devices
and application software administrated by cloud partners that
enable the enterprise users with their business partners to
collaborate and unite at work; (4) market sales cloud which
includes tools for executing, managing, and analyzing the results
in multiple market divisions; (5) content cloud which shares the
contents within the entire firm; (6) community cloud which
supports communities established by firms and individuals with
their user and friends; and (7) analyzing cloud which supplies
real-time reports, computations, and data mining, as well as
assistance in decision making and resource assignments.

The business cloud is one of the usage and implementation areas

of cloud computing application, or a subset of cloud computing.
Thus, it possesses all the properties of cloud computing.
Specifically, its users are from the business field, and its cloud
recourses (systems and services) are oriented toward business
application (Figure 1). For example, an enterprise user has 2000
branches, and its business data are distributed among these
branches. For those branches, storage of their business data using

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The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II lists

several important and famous cloud providers and their cloud
products. The customer relationship management (CRM) cloud as
an example for business cloud is discussed in Section III. Section
IV concludes the paper.



Figure 1. Cloud and business cloud

Figure 2. CRM cloud



As a whole, the direct use of Web-based application integration

into business cloud is a significant process for business staff. On
one hand, copying and installing are much cheaper and
considerably more convenient to manage on the cloud than on
every personal computer. On the other hand, upgrading the
applications in the cloud is conducted only once. In contrast,
installing the same software into all PCs has to be done
individually [2].

2. ENTERPRISE SERVICE PROVIDERS

FOR CLOUD AND BUSINESS CLOUD
Currently, Google, IBM, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Alibaba,
Salesforce.com, etc. have started developing cloud computing.
Google conveniently allows running in parallel with large third
party software with very low requirements for the user terminals,
and thus, easily realizes the goal of sharing data and applications
among different devices. With its exceptional predominance on
the Web, Google offers an integrated environment for applications
using its powerful search engine. The cloud computing tools of
Google empower the users to develop their own applications and
upload them to the engine clouds.

Business cloud is advantageous for small firms that do not have

enough budgets for developing large-scale applications. By
deploying the locally developed Web applications into the cloud,
small businesses do not have to purchase expensive hardware and
software. Most small firms do not have maintenance budget for
their software and software security. Although they can outsource
their software development, renting the same software application
on the cloud reduces cost, allows avoidance of investment on local
machines, and liberate staff and other resources, allowing the staff
to concentrate on their own routine businesses and the redirecting
of the of use of other resources.

IBM has developed a blue cloud plan that allows users to build
their new application programs, and access large shared
computing nodes. With the blue cloud plan, middle- and smallsize firms can distribute their computing tasks into the clouds.
Additionally, IBM has developed the Hadoop, an open source load
deployment software for controlling cloud hardware.

3. BUSINESS CLOUD EXAMPLE:

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT (CRM) CLOUD

Amazon.com, which started with an online bookstore, is currently

one of the largest online retail stores in the world. Now, it is also a
major cloud computing provider. The representative product of
Amazon.com is Amazon elastic compute cloud (Amazon EC2). It
allows developers to rent the cloud devices of Amazon.com and
run their own programs on the Amazon.coms cloud. EC2 requires
the users to appoint the number of virtual machines, and load their
applications on them. The users may establish, start, and end their
programs. Hence, the operations are called elastic operations.
Amazon.com offers users three services: (1) small-scale service
with 1.7 G memory, 160 GB hard disk space, and a virtual CPU
equivalent to a 32 bit CPU; (2) large-scale service with 7.5 G
memory, 850 GB hard disk space, and a virtual CPU equivalent to
two 64 bit CPUs; and (3) super large-scale service with 15 G
memory, 1700 GB hard disk space, and a virtual CPU equivalent
to four 64 bit CPUs.

The process of managing the requirements, willingness, and

purchase styles of customers is called the customer relationship
management (CRM). CRMs not only help business enterprise
understand and forecast the present and potential requirements of
customers, but also work as an important tool for building good
customer relationship. CRM is an ideal application for business
cloud. When utilized as a typical application of business cloud, it
is called the CRM cloud. CRM cloud places all its business
information into the cloud, such as information on customers and
important business records. This is an improvement over storing
these data in a single computer server which results in several
defects. These data, which contain information such as when to
connect to specific customers, when to make the follow-up visits,
the work specified by the leaders, become accessible from
different locations and may be updated from time to time.
Business CRM cloud has all of these information in the cloud, and
the business agents can retrieve the information any time through
middle ware gateways. Consequently, the activity arrangements,
appointment alerting, account management, sales report, and
email can be managed with extreme convenience. Furthermore,
the method of saving customer information in 1000 branches with
timing updating may cause several problems in practice. However,
with cloud computing, firms not only can access the data
according to needs and locations, but can reduce the storage and
computation costs as well (Figure 2).

Microsoft has announced the Windows Azure operating system,

with an idea to extend PCs to the blue sky by Internet.
Alibaba provides the so-called Alibaba cloud. With its leading
advantage in eBusiness, Alibaba built its eBusiness cloud called
the business cloud group. Alibaba inserts its cores business
software, e.g., e-network and cbismb, which provides payment
and usage methods through online SaaS. Apparently, Alibaba
provides a powerful back end technical support and super
computing platform, which can be regarded as an eBusiness cloud
center.
Salesforce.com is another typical enterprise cloud computing firm.
The enterprise users may access their sales cloud, service cloud,
and force.com platforms through cloud. Salesforce.com requires
its enterprise users to pay the monthly subscription fee. The
application programs provided by salesforce.com are applicable to
firms with various scales and types. Each account has a different
market price. The pricing policies are influenced by the number
and type of usage of users. After payment, the users can build
their businesses on the hardware and software of salesforce.com.
Moreover, salesforce not only allows the users to tailor their own
cloud configurations, but also presents several built-in and
application-oriented tools.

At one end, firms place their customer information into the CRM
cloud; at the other end, the computing application tools are
provided on the cloud to facilitate the usage of these customer
data, and analyzing, optimizing, and mining the data can be
conducted. At the one end of the cloud, firm agents can obtain
assistance from the cloud in discovering the best ways to contact
their customers. For example, they can use CRM cloud programs
to mine which customers have ordered the most number of goods,
and keep in touch with those customers through phone and email.
They may also find out which customers make the most frequent
contacts with the technical support, and actively send support



information. Thus, the agents can arrange special technical

seminars to cut down on the cost for technical support.

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the present paper, we extended the concept of cloud into
business cloud, and designed a concrete format of business cloud,
using the CRM cloud as an example.

When salespersons use CRM cloud, they are actually accessing a

subset of CRM cloud. We call it the CRM cloud sales force
individuation (CRM-C-SFI) or CRM cloud sales force automation
(CRM-C-SFA). CRM-C-SFA application executes all the
customer-centered work in the CRM cloud with the sales-oriented
method. For example, the firm agents use the CRM-C-SFA
software to help them decide when to make a phone call to the
sales for follow-ups, or provide more information to potential
customers. The CRM-C-SFA allows the salespersons to obtain
key information even if they are traveling. They only need to log
in into the cloud and issue a necessary command on their
terminals.

The emergence of business cloud is good news for small firms

without special recourses. Accordingly, they can focus on their
business without worrying about storage, access to operations, and
the hiring of special IT staff. What they need solely is to propose
their requirements and subsequently, they can obtain the related
service computing from cloud.
Nevertheless, the development of business cloud may encounter a
few obstacles in practice. For example, although the business
cloud may provide unlimited computing and storing resources for
middle and small scale firms, the reliability, network bandwidth as
well as business data security and privacy become urgent issues.
These should be addressed in the future.

Crucial for validating the CRM cloud is the use of the enterprisecentered approach. Technology is only one necessary component.
Furthermore, the enterprise resource procedures should be
modified to match and support CRM cloud. The management of
firms must correspond with these procedures. Cloud may provide
some solutions. For implementing new CRM styles, the firm must
take steps to renovate seriously.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for
the Central Universities, Research Funds of Renmin University of
China (10XNI029, Research on Financial Web Data Mining and
Knowledge Management), and the Natural Science Foundation of
China under grant 70871001.

Another typical example of CRM cloud is the BigContacts

(www.bigcontacts.com). BigContacts is a cloud computing-based
CRM management. Its design objective is to support
simultaneously a system with 2000 online users. The functions
include address books, group calendars, task managers, and lists
of work to be done. Its CRM cloud accommodates a number of
available operations, such as sales tracing, activity reports, group
reports, cellulous phone connections, and fees.

6. REFERENCES
[1] Reese, G. 2009. Cloud Application Architectures: Building
Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud, O'Reilly.
[2] Sosinsky, B. 2011. Cloud Computing Bible, Wiley.
[3] Velte, T., Velte, A., and Elsenpeter, R. 2009. Cloud
Computing, A Practical Approach, McGraw-Hill Osborne
Media.