A recent uptick in coverage of Entellium’s new CRM applications continues with Marshall Lager’s post on destinationCRM.com.

With the release of Rave Plus, Rave Complete, and Rave Insight, Entellium is giving every small business owner considering a CRM solution—including SaaS offerings like Salesforce—an interesting option for leveraging the power of their existing PCs while delivering a highly engaging user experience. Entellium’s “Gamer-Influenced Design”—along with some really slick drag-and-drop customization features I saw during a recent visit to their Seattle offices—should have strong appeal for competition-oriented sales teams. Before jumping on the Salesforce bandwagon, give Rave a hard look.

I have been working with some of the folks at Entellium for a while now, and what I find inspiring about my contacts there is the simple fact that these guys know how to hustle, know how to go after customer wins, know that it takes more than a post on TechCrunch to build a company. Who knows how the story will end, but for now I have to hand it to these guys for staying in the game and taking some risks in not jumping on the pure SaaS model. (In fact, they’ve seen significant increases in application usage once they chose to leverage the power of client computing along with the power of the Internet—something I heard a good bit of at the recent Google IO Developer Conference.)

Congrats to Entellium on their Rave releases!

Here is a video from MIX08 (March 2008) of Jared Ruckle, Senior Director of Product Management & Design for Entellium, talking about his company and about working with the Emerging Business Team.

Video: Microsoft Startup Zone

Following is a transcript of the video:

JARED RUCKLE: I'm Jared Ruckle. I'm senior director of product management and design at Entellium.

We're an on-demand CRM company focused on small to midsized businesses, and we see a huge opportunity to help small businesses be more productive with well-designed software to meet their sales, marketing, and customer service needs.

There's a real problem in the industry today where small businesses can't find technology to help them really be more successful. On the very low end you have Outlook and Excel and Act and Goldmine that are great for certain things, but not really optimized to help businesses succeed in the age of the Internet today. Then on the high-end you have Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP that offer a sea of technology; again, great for large businesses, but again not really appropriate for small businesses.

So, at Entellium we're trying to fit that niche with just right technology that helps small to midsized businesses succeed, acquire leads more effectively, win deals more often, and keep customers happier longer.

So, when we looked at the landscape of products out there, there was a real gap in the sense that all the products were too hard to use, they weren't very engaging, and frankly they were boring.

So, when Entellium looked to fill this gap, we turned to Microsoft and technologies like Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation to build very visually compelling applications on this technology that would be demonstrably clearer to small businesses about how they could run their business more effectively using these very engaging UI and applications.

So, working with the Microsoft Emerging Business Team has been critical to our effort in that area, because frankly we're on the bleeding edge of a lot of these tools, and so the technical help we've been able to get from Microsoft, helping our developers navigate all the ins and outs of the product roadmap, when we should be introducing new features, what's on the roadmap, has been instrumental to planning our technology now and for the future, as well as our back-end architecture.

On the marketing front Microsoft has been a powerful voice for us, allowed us to borrow their very large megaphone to go to the market and say, Mr. Small Business Owner, there is some technology out there today that will enable you to be more successful than you ever thought, with technology that's just right for you.

So, the Emerging Business Team has been very helpful technology-wise, as well as co-marketing-wise, and with all the exciting things Microsoft is doing with emerging user interface technologies, we're very confident that we'll be able to meet this market need now and in the future.