About GoldMine
GoldMine® CRM, a division of Ivanti, builds Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions for small and medium businesses. GoldMine is used by organizations in more than 80 verticals and 45 countries to grow their business and build enduring relationships with customers. Solutions include GoldMine Premium Edition; iGoldMine, which enables companies to run GoldMine Premium in the cloud and on mobile devices; and GoldMine Cloud CRM, a cloud-based version of GoldMine.
The Challenge
GoldMine was originally sold to small and medium-sized business customers, who installed the software on-premises on end users’ Microsoft® Windows® computers. While GoldMine customers loved the software, many customers employed workers that needed to use GoldMine but rarely came to the office.
Providing GoldMine licenses to remote users meant that the main office had no access to the data entered by those remote users without using GoldMine’s synchronization engine to synch that data with the main office data. Remote users would have to “check in” regularly and synch with the central database to get data updates and send their changes.
Since users could not add or update data during a synch, most GoldMine customers would synch Goldmine data after business hours. As Goldmine customers grew their teams and businesses, they found that the more users synching, and the more data being synched, the longer the synch took to execute. Some larger Goldmine customers found it increasingly difficult to complete a synch in the timeframe available.
Additionally, during this time, the GoldMine management team saw competitors enter the market with web-based solutions that enabled real-time access.
Said Paul Petersen, GoldMine Vice President & General Manager, “It became clear that our primary objective was to determine a way to provide real-time remote access to all GoldMine features and central database.”
The GoldMine engineering team knew that rewriting GoldMine as a web-native application was a huge undertaking due to its extensive feature set. They decided instead to build a new web client, but realized after a few months that the approach would be almost as time-consuming and costly as rewriting the entire application. To stay competitive without a rewrite, the only option left to them was to provide customers with the capability to publish the GoldMine application and make it available in real-time to their employees via the internet.
As the Goldmine team was evaluating approaches to rewrite the application, one of Goldmine’s biggest users, a government agency in Ireland providing services to disabled children and adults, reported that they were unable to finish a nightly synch of every case worker’s data update to the main office database during the 12 hours when the office was closed. This situation created even more urgency for Goldmine CRM.
Solution
GoldMine CRM evaluated two application publishing approaches, Microsoft RDS and Citrix®. Both technologies imposed a significant IT burden on customers. Paul Petersen recalled, “The multi-user access options available at the time were expensive and complex and not well suited to our many small- to medium-sized accounts. While smaller businesses may only have a few remote users, they still wanted to give those users real-time access—but were reluctant to make a significant investment of time and money to get there.”
While the Goldmine team considered its options, a GoldMine product manager learned about GraphOn® GO-Global® and brought it to the team for evaluation.
Paul said, “GO-Global was the answer. Installation and set-up were easy for the customer. We didn’t have to make any changes to GoldMine for it to run properly on GO-Global. In fact, with GO-Global, GoldMine runs exactly the same for remote employees as it does for those in the office!”
Adding GO-Global to Goldmine’s largest user’s implementation solved that organization’s synch issue. Paul explained, “They were able to deploy Goldmine with GO-Global for their users with internet access and retain synch for users working in rural areas with intermittent internet access, or users able to come into the office. This mixed solution reduced the IT team’s time and effort spent on user administration and synch management, and enabled them to meet every user’s needs.”
Paul concluded, “GO-Global gave us everything we needed, and we didn’t have to rewrite anything. It was exactly right for us.”
“GoldMine with GO-Global is a strong solution that competes well with SaaS. It’s uncomplicated and cost-effective, and it continues to work well for us today." — PAUL PETERSEN, Vice President & General Manager, GoldMine CRM
Results
GoldMine sells GO-Global as an add-on option to Goldmine to customers that need to support remote employees. Said Paul, “Implementing this new approach using GO-Global was not complicated. It made perfect sense to our customers. GO-Global has made it easier to grow our business and retain existing customers over the long term. And, technically speaking, we’ve had virtually no support issues—GO-Global has been very solid for us.”
Paul continued, “We also like two key ancillary benefits GO-Global gives us in addition to real-time remote access. First, it allows our customers to use GO-Global to publish Goldmine plus their other business applications in a virtual workspace that can be used by remote and in-office employees. That has become a very attractive advantage for customers and prospects. Second, we can now sell Goldmine to businesses with employees using Macs and Linux machines.”
Another significant advantage to Goldmine and its resellers is that reselling GO-Global puts resellers in the enviable position of being a “one-stop-shop”—plus, it delivers additional revenue with many Goldmine sales.
Paul concludes, “GoldMine with GO-Global is a strong solution that competes well with SaaS. It’s uncomplicated and cost-effective, and it continues to work well for us today.”
