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CRM in 2009: Personal, Social, Mobile, Adaptable September 14, 2009 
Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software make it possible for companies to apply a personal touch to the mass market -- and that's golden.
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Funny, Beautiful Symmetry September 09, 2009 
There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way.
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Main Street Meets the Cloud August 12, 2009 
Late on a summer morning recently I got a call from my wife saying "On Point," a public radio program, was doing a show on about cloud computing. "Isn't that what you write about?" she said. "You should listen or call in." Well, I tried, and all the lines were jammed, but I was able to make a comment on the Web site. It was a funny show in some respects, though short on laughs.
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Oracle Gives JD Edwards a PIP of an Upgrade August 11, 2009 
Oracle is giving users of JD Edwards -- one of the myriad enterprise software suites the company has acquired over the last decade -- a new set of tools to leverage through its value chain planning applications. It's upgrading the JD Edwards offering with a bundle of SCM-related applications and best practices that Oracle developed for its own products over the years.
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The State of BPM: Poised for Takeoff August 10, 2009 
Nothing like a recession to spur business growth. In the BPM space, the current downturn has presented a major marketing opportunity for software and IT service firms. Sparked by customers seeking to cut costs and by innovations in e-commerce, the BPM market could easily double over the next several years.
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Pain and Paradigm Shift August 05, 2009 
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts last week that ultra-thin PCs will be the answer to the growing popularity of netbooks. I doubt that, but I can certainly understand Ballmer's interest in backing the ultra-thins, and this obviously has implications for larger issues like cloud computing. By now, the sides have been clearly marked out in the debate about on-demand vs. on-premise.
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Ntractive CRM Tethers the Mac Desktop to the Cloud August 03, 2009 
In the architecture of heavy-duty business programs, customer relationship management software is a load-bearing beam. It's a mission critical application that can be a key to success. It's also the sort of app that operates very comfortably in "the cloud" -- that metaphor for the Internet and platform-agnostic computing.
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Managing Content Instead of Data: Q&A With SpringCM CEO Dan Carmel August 03, 2009 
There are always niche vendors developing new applications around functionality that doesn't quite fit into a defined software category. When the analyst community takes note -- and then decides to give the category a name -- a bona fide trend is established. That is happening to SpringCM, a SaaS provider that helps companies manage their processes around content rather than data.
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Primary Indicators July 29, 2009 
I am hearing from vendors that their on-premise CRM sales in the early part of this year are pretty good. No one has briefed me ahead of their earnings calls, but the results from late last year and Q1 seem to be pretty good. I should probably wait until the numbers for the last quarter come out from the vendors, but I've seen enough to call an obvious trend.
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Efficiency Through Outsourced Marketing: Q&A With Quaero Founder Naras Eechambadi July 27, 2009 
It may seem that CSG Systems, a provider of customer interaction and billing management software, acquired marketing company Quaero in the nick of time. The deal was announced at the end of the year -- just as it was becoming painfully clear that the recession was likely to be much deeper than initially feared.
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The Joy of Customer Satisfaction: Q&A With Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner July 27, 2009 
Not surprisingly, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries -- and, to a lesser extent, biotech -- are waiting with great interest to see how the health insurance and care plan making its way through Congress will look in its final form. What many probably have not realized is that the companies that sell and market to these entities are just as interested.
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Learning to Use the Force July 23, 2009 
For the upcoming study, "The 2009 SFA Report: Best-in-Class Strategies for Increasing Returns on SFA Investments," Aberdeen surveyed over 195 companies that are automating sales activity. In the research, Salesforce.com featured prominently as a solution provider of choice.
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It's All About Nurturing Leads: Q&A With Manticore CEO Jeff Erramouspe July 20, 2009 
This is the marketing resource management world: There are the enterprise-oriented types of platforms that can handle robust applications. Their downside is that they require consultants to manage their difficult implementations and dedicated personnel for their ongoing use. Then there are the lower-end tools that give users relatively limited functionality -- but are easy to implement and operate.
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Spectral Analysis July 15, 2009
My ride from San Francisco Airport to Redwood Shores, Calif., tells the story of my entire trip to the West Coast last week. Southbound on Route 101, traffic was lighter than I was accustomed to in my more than 10 years of visiting the area. Northbound, there was a five-mile backup, which caused me to miss a meeting later on in the city.
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Making the Rapid ROI Promise Stick: Q&A With Savvion CEO M.A. Ketabchi July 13, 2009 
M.A. Ketabchi, president, CEO and founder of business process management provider
Savvion, might have done just as well focusing on product marketing in his career. From the beginning, he has distinguished Savvion from the competition by concentrating on the one thing potential customers care about the most: rapid ROI.
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SaaS Keeps Recession Wolves at Bay: Q&A With E2open CEO Mark Woodward July 06, 2009 
It is has been a roller-coaster year for E2open CEO Mark Woodward, mainly because that is how long he has been at the helm of the Software as a Service provider of supply-and-demand chain, procurement, and B2B integration applications. Over the past twelve months, he oversaw a shift in product focus and the introduction of new functionality, primarily on the sell side.
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