Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Manu Das President and CEO Manu Das, president and founder of Soffront Software, Inc., is responsible for managing the worldwide executive activities of the company including sales, marketing, and research/development. Mr. Das founded Soffront to create easy-to-use, truly customizable and adaptable customer and quality management software for the small-to-mid-size businesses (SMBs). Soffront created this product in 1992 when Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was not even introduced. Mr. Das is a visionary who understood that product quality and the customer support for that product must be redefined for the industry – particularly for the SMBs. Mr. Das is a true leader who understands technology as much as management, business, and finance. For the past 19 years, Soffront has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability. The company has focused on the SMB market – an area that has been largely ignored in respect to CRM software. Mr. Das feels that his greatest accomplishment in the industry is that Soffront Software provides SMBs with the same rich experience of customer interaction, retention, and loyalty as their larger counterparts. "While other vendors like Siebel catered to the large businesses during the mid/late 90s, we focused on teaching SMBs that CRM was not a luxury. We painstakingly explained, educated and convinced SMBs that CRM was appropriate for every company -- no matter what their size." Das continued, "As an early innovator, we took a lot of heat selling this idea to SMBs. Our efforts opened up the SMB market to many other CRM vendors that came into existence more than five years after Soffront's introduction. I believe Soffront's contribution to the SMB CRM market parallels Siebel's contribution to CRM for the large business market." Prior to founding Soffront, Mr. Das dedicated several years to the Olivetti advanced technology center at Cupertino, California as a true pioneer and a successful leader. Mr. Das worked with the senior management of Olivetti, Italy to create and launch a suite of products in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Under the leadership of Mr. Das, Olivetti launched many successful AI products in the areas of Expert Systems, Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Neural Networks. Under his leadership, Olivetti created various technological partners from private companies to reputable institutions such as Digitalk, Stanford University, and California Institute of Technology, Pasadena to name a few. While at Olivetti, Mr. Das also led the vision and implementation of global software development, management and distribution process for the multi-national company – a concept far ahead of its time. Prior to that, Mr. Das led the research and development effort of deploying AI technology in a human-less factory floor for National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, California). Mr. Das successfully researched and deployed vision recognition techniques to detect manufacturing defects and predicting cures using AI – which was never attempted before at National. Prior to his work at National Semiconductor, Mr. Das worked for FMC Corporation (Santa Clara, Calif.) where he carried out research and development efforts jointly with Stanford University in the area of object recognition, obstacle avoidance and robotics. While at FMC, he was one of the main researchers of a highly visible DARPA project of automatic test vehicles. Mr. Das received a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of New York, Buffalo and carried out research for his Ph.D. program in the area of Pattern Recognition using Artificial Intelligence for over two years. Mr. Das also received a Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with distinction from Indian Institute of India Madras, India.