Gosh, I love writing about Infinity — it always gives me an excuse to play this audio clip!
So during the hottest part of the heat wave in New York City last week, in my room, with its lack of an A/C, I listened to Shaun Sullivan, Blackbaud’s CTO, outline his plan of attack for the next year. This interview is in two parts because Mr. Sullivan just blasted me with a firehose of details and information, all of it juicy and too long to present in one blog posting. Suffice it to say, that you could sense that Blackbaud was gearing up to really cement their hold on their current customers and prevent any future inroads from salesforce.com. And as I was sweating profusely wishing that I had bought a fan, he stressed that all the technology he was talking about that day with the exception of “Scorpio” was actually shipping software but only to a select client list.
Let’s get some issues straightened out because Blackbaud’s recent spate of press releases have left myself and a lot of other Blackbaud users quite mystified. Mr. Sullivan was kind enough to give me a run-down on Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing.
- Blackbaud Enterprise CRM is what was called “Galileo”. It is NOT Raiser’s Edge 8 but it is Infinity. It is dedicated to high-end fundraising and definitely not the shrinkwrapped version that we’ll see when Infinity is finally released to us mere mortals. This launched in Q1 of 2007.
- Blackbaud Direct Marketing is what was called “Bullseye”, also built on Infinity. It is dedicated to high-end marketing and list acquisition and was released in Q1 of 2007.
Now get this, Raiser’s Edge 8 is NOT the Infinity platform. Raiser’s Edge 8 is the mass-market version (as mass-market as Raiser’s Edge can get I guess) of the Infinity platform. I guess, for all intents and purposes, you, dear reader, and I will never see Infinity unless you’re a high-end client. That is, if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a very good chance you won’t see it at all.
But let’s talk about what Mr. Sullivan has dubbed “Scorpio”. It is Blackbaud’s on-demand platform that combines Blackbaud’s NetCommunity and a CRM. It will be written in .NET 3.0, rely on open standards, focus on extensibility and integration, highly secure, and it will be built so that IT Operations people won’t tear their hair out trying to maintain it.
Scorpio is using .NET’s standard hooks for a rich internet application (RIA) so the new Raiser’s Edge 8 is pretty much a Web application that also serves as a thin client. We might even see a Silverlight version of Scorpio come to light since Silverlight may get wrapped into .NET fairly soon. And Scorpio runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Report Services 2005.
However, you’ll be given a choice between using the on-demand version of Scorpio, hosting it yourself, or asking a third-party vendor to host it for you. That’s right, Blackbaud is trying to open up the Raiser’s Edge market for ISVs so that they can actually make a bit of money hosting Blackbaud applications. Unfortunately, a lot of the details that would outline how a future relationship between an ISV and Blackbaud will be are still to be worked out. They know they have to focus on helping their future ISV partners make money but they have yet to figure out what direction they need to take.
The self-hosted and third-party hosted versions are more like the traditional Raiser’s Edge 7 that we’re seeing now but just more hefty, featuring things like Active Directory integration. The on-demand version will not have AD integration.
However, if you’re just using the web services API that will be built into Scorpio you won’t have to pay to code for it, but any under-the-hood APIs will need an upfront payment to access. I really, really hope that goes away and that Blackbaud doesn’t raise the barriers of entry for new developers. That’s a great way of driving away a lot of future ISVs from the platform. Well, at least the web services API is open but it’s in SOAP, not REST. And yes, you can now do Facebook and MSN Virtual Earth mashups with Blackbaud applications and that will also be rolled into Raiser’s Edge 8.
And that gets me to the end of Part 1. The next part will discuss what Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing can do, how they’re architected and what that means for Raiser’s Edge 8.
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