TOP NEWS

Contatta Funding Puts ACT!, Goldmine Founders Head To Head Again

Once upon a time, when the desktop PC was king, there were two kingdoms in the world of customer relationship management: ACT!, created by Pat Sullivan, and Goldmine, created by Jon Ferrara. If you were in sales, you either ran ACT!, or your ran Goldmine, and the two companies competed head to head in managing every salesperson's contact list. However, somewhere in the intervening years--as the Internet grew--both ACT! and Goldmine faded away, no longer the two kings of the sales CRM world.

However, fast forward to today, and the two players behind the two biggest CRM software products of the desktop PC age--Pat Sullivan and Jon Ferrara--are head to head again, as Sullivan's new startup, Contatta, announced a funding round for its launch of a new, customer relationship management software product. The new startup goes head to head against Ferrara's startup, Nimble, which has been looking to reinvent customer relationship management for the Internet and social age for a few years now.

So far, Nimble has the edge, as the Santa Monica company has been offering up its products to the market since 2011, and Contatta just announced the company and has yet to launch its own software. However, it will be interesting to see how two of the most experienced people in the world of CRM succeed--or fail--in the new world of software-as-a-service; and if one of these two veterans will succeed, or some other, upstart will instead seize the market.