Good things take time. That goes for the crafting of software and applications, too.
Junxure Cloud is no exception. I first began to tell readers about the application's impending arrival (originally to be called Junxure Essentials) this time last year.
It was at that time that adviser and CRM Software Inc. co-founder Greg Friedman and his partner Ken Golding first showed me some preliminary mock-ups of the interface.
Last Tuesday, I received a demo of a production-ready working version and I have to say that Junxure Cloud is shaping up nicely.
It is simple, intuitive and streamlined, both in general and in comparison with its ancestor — and by using the word “ancestor,” I do not mean to ding the venerable on-premises version of Junxure. It is one of the most ubiquitous customer relationship management applications out there and is certainly the most focused on registered investment advisers, running in 1,400 firms and having 11,000 users.
Now for the promised details: Finalized pricing will be $75 per user per month, which comes out to $900 per user per year for the annual upfront contract and payment (and that is how firms will pay, not on a month-to-month basis).
THREE-USER MINIMUM
A source pointed out to me last Wednesday, a day after this was first posted on Investment News.com, that there is a three-user minimum for Junxure Cloud, raising the minimum price to $2,700 per year. While that seems reasonable for any multiperson firm, I suspect there will be quite a few sole proprietors who were interested in the product and now will not be (I heard from two in this category in just one day after the story was posted). My gut tells me that this is a vestige of the way CRM Software has always functioned, but I have yet to confirm. By that I mean that there has — in the past, anyway — been a significant amount of support cost built into working with advisers. A break-even with a little profit margin may be unattainable for them at a single-user cost — just conjecture on my part.
There will be an introductory price of $59 per user per month when CRM Software begins taking orders, which it expects to do in August or early September. Junxure Cloud will go into production use with a limited number of firms beginning in August. It's subject to change, but Mr. Friedman expects general availability in early October.
“As for our migration path, there are two kinds of people coming to us: current Junxure users and new customers,” Mr. Friedman said.
Existing customers will be provided a somewhat automated migration tool that will allow a firm to conduct a preliminary assessment and do most of the heavy lifting in moving to the cloud themselves, he said.
Firms that have created many of their own customizations for their installation can receive assistance from CRM Software's migration team for an additional fee.
“All of that can be assessed before a commitment is made,” Mr. Friedman said.
He was quick to add that the company's migration team actually moves and reconciles data so that firms will have a usable database right away.
“This is not a conversion where you have unreconciled data going in, making the system for all intents and purposes unusable,” he said.
One more bit of news: While he was not ready to go on the record about who the provider will be, a suite of third-party e-mail and social-media archiving and compliance tools will be integrated with Junxure Cloud at or soon after general release. This will be at an additional, as-yet-undisclosed fee.
