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Have you voted yet? Not in the presidential election -- this is more important! I am talking about voting in the CRM Idol competition. It's time! OK, I know what you are thinking: What is CRM Idol? It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, and its purpose is to find the hottest emerging company in the ...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...

I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in college, and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about springtime and renewal. This April was especially memorable in our industry, and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the things I witnessed. Mostly, for...

Small CRM players have a chance to get their names out in the market if they win top spot at the second annual CRM Idol competition, which kicked off Monday. Hopefuls have until 6 p.m. Pacific time on May 25 to file their submissions. Contestants will be assigned a mentor to help them prepare the b...

To get a sense of all the wonderfulness surrounding Convergence, you need only glance at some of the many observations made by the likes of Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Dennis Howlett, Josh Greenbaum and many others. So kudos to Microsoft. My observations will be somewhat different. While I also t...

M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. The solution will help customers manage data from their business phone system and othe...

I'm ensconced at the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando this week for IBM's concurrent Lotusphere/IBM Connect shows, and all the announcements here paint the picture of a company and a partner ecosystem that is going all-in on collaboration. Big Blue's fuddy-duddy reputation is ...

Every year around this time, I write two columns -- one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. There is no methodology for this process, and I believe this lack of method is important. I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been on my mind for the last ...

The CRM Idols have been announced. The goal of the contest was to identify the best corporate video developed by an up-and-coming CRM company. In the Americas, the winning firm is Get Satisfaction. In the EMEA region, it is BPMonline. The companies were chosen by popular vote of subject matter exper...

One of the announcements Marc Benioff made in his Day 1 keynote here at Dreamforce was Database.com. The news is that Salesforce is now enabling its customers to store their data on their own hardware inside their data centers. There is a need -- or at least a demand -- for this capability, as man...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the un...

Today's column is a little different from the usual fare. Beagle Research Group has once again recognized a handful of companies with its annual WizKids award, this time for their innovations in front office computing. The idea behind the award -- and a report that goes with it -- is that innovati...

I am fond of Paul Greenberg because he's smart and knows a heck of a lot about CRM -- most importantly, he's a good judge of whether a company is for real or just playing around. I am also grateful to him for pointing out that I was the fortunate one to identify on-demand technology as a disruptive...

Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, a new social media application. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a free platform that lets people send out messages of no more than 140 characters to as broad a community as they can build. The posts, or "tweets," as they're known, can cover ...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

Gartner's CRM conference is always a big event for the industry. The 2008 gathering, which just wrapped, was no different, with attendees leaving the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Oxon Hill, Md., in a thoughtful mood over the direction CRM is heading. Not surprisingly, there was a...

After a long build-up, I think we're finally at the real beginning of a new era in computing. The previous 10 years have laid an important foundation, by which I mean on-demand computing, but if you thought that was it, I think the next few years could blow you away. Take a look at the driving force...

SAP held its massive annual conference, Sapphire, last week and made the usual flurry of announcements and presentations to its 15,000-some attendees. Still, as is typical of most conferences, the best information filtered out between the official scheduled events. Among the observations CRM guru Pa...