Hello All..

I have been let go by IBM Canada due to downsizing.  I have 15 years of CRM and Business Systems Analysis experience.  From that I have worked for Pivotal Corporation for 4 years and I have worked with their Pivotal CRM (windows client) for 11 years including crystal reports, syndmail and vaultus integration.

If anybody wishes to contract me out for either the windows client development or to perform some BSA work.. you can download my resume from my LinkedIn.com profile, workopolis.com, monster.ca or careerbuilder.ca

thank you
Tom Delios

The overall experience was terrible..

After losing my job at IBM back in april '09, I thought that it would be extremely easy to get a 'pivotal' full-time job in the Toronto area, considering that I am master certified in all aspects of pivotal windows access customization, crystal reports and system administration for version 5.7..

Instead, I found myself becoming a contractor for the next 4 months taking on mulitple jobs to help organizations in the Toronto area sunset/retire their existing pivotal CRM solution and rip out the enterprise CRM data from them to hand off to an administrator/developer of the replaced CRM solution which was either Microsoft CRM 4.0 or SalesForce.com..  I must have assisted in retiring at least a dozen systems in a 4 month time span.

The understanding that I was hearing is that since pivotal was moviing away from pivotal agents from version 6 onward, that it did not make business sense to keep it when the existing supporting staff did not know how to program, especially a new interface release.  Even though it is version 6.. in reality it is version 1 of a new environment.

I warned pivotal product marketing managers many times in the past before losing my job and said it was a bad idea for the new direction.  I did confirm that having the pivotal agents concept in a web environment was possible, but they chose not to go that direction.

Ironically enough, there is a start up company in Toronto by a bunch of owners that used to have a previous CRM company that was bought out by Siebel a while ago.  They are releasing another CRM software at the end of 2010 that is completed web service based and that customization is virtually identical to pivotal's window access development environment.  Their forecasted sales on pre-orders is big for 2011.

I've heard whispers that someone finally woke up at pivotal and wants to change direction of the ship to include pivotal agents again.. but again, it was only rumours thinking to give hope to their existing customer base windows access customers who have to upgrade to the new environment within the next 2-3 years before their support is discontinued on the older versions of pivotal.

thanx for the inquiry..

Hi everyone.
As tdelios remarks about going from pivotal x.x to 6.x, I also get the same feedback from the current owners of the crm (pivotal 5.9) I support.
As soon as I told them the requirements to "migrate" to Sedna... to rewrite everything, agents, scripts, etc.. they changed their mind.. and also started to consider (and ask for) others CRM solutions on the market.
For them, to rewrite the almost stable product they use is very traumatic since the solution also affect core bussiness rules (to issue orders and to collect $$$$).

by the way.. they only extended for 1 more year the contract for support and maintenance

regards,
Harold