By Chris Bucholtz

Outsourcing is old hat in the call center space, but don’t be surprised to see it catching on elsewhere in CRM. After all, isn’t SaaS a form of outsourcing in its way, since all the backup, update and infrastructure issues are “outsourced” back to the vendor?

EDS’s Steve Ditto hopes that trend continues to gain momentum. As vice president of CRM services at the company, which was recently acquired by Hewlett Packard, he thinks the climate is right for a big uptick in the number of companies using services companies like his to do the heavy lifting behind the scenes for their CRM efforts, leaving them to handle customer strategy and execution.

“There are a lot of ways to deal with this economic environment,” Ditto says. “Some companies are closing locations, cutting resources, and cutting back on staff, and customers are feeling that. And this comes at a point when preserving those loyal customers is the single most important thing you need to do to succeed.”

In that environment, it becomes difficult for companies to add new features in a timely and economical way. Ditto is only too happy to raise his hand and suggest EDS as a way to boost service without breaking the bank.

“Our customers are asking for infrastructure as a service,” he says. “They don’t care what’s under the covers – they want to buy IP telephony, or IVR or call recording. With a services model, they can be assured that they’re getting it from someone who’s done it successfully before, and can scale that expertise across multiple companies.”

EDS’s customers are typically large organizations with somewhat complex customer service needs, like airlines and banks. EDS can provide some best-practices consulting while allowing their customers to focus on customer strategies – the things that give them a competitive advantage – instead of getting bogged down in the infrastructure component. “We want to get out of the plumbing business and be in the technology-as-a-service business,” says Ditto. “We can’t tell you how to run an airline or a bank, but we can serve as an execution partner for your customer strategy.”

Ditto says the economy hasn’t resulted in a contraction of outsourcing – which makes sense, since companies are eager to reduce their expenses and outsourcing is one of the most common approaches to wringing costs out of technology. It presents large organizations in the era of SaaS with something really interesting – the ability to deploy CRM software with some agility direct from vendors onto a third-party’s infrastructure. Maximizing the value from this ability, however, will require imagination – and I have to wonder if the decision makers at organizations as big as airlines and banks both posses that imagination or the authority to put that imagination to work. I keep saying that the winners in CRM will be those organizations that use the data it collects most creatively; I should amend that to say it will also be dependent on who uses the infrastructure at their disposal most creatively as well.