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If your attention to on demand CRM has been focused on the sales and marketing side of the equation, RightNow comes as something of a surprise because this company's origins focus on service and support -- an important differentiator and well worth remembering as on demand vendors, including this on...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

It's worth taking another look at the Siebel-Oracle merger from a different angle. Too often we make a snap judgment in this kind of situation and it becomes fixed in the mind never to be seriously re-examined. Rather than that, I did a thought experiment the other day starting with the presumptio...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for ...

It's very rare that you get clean demarcations between historical eras. Maybe the asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago was such an event, but I wasn't there to experience it so I can't tell you. Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 will go down as a deep line in the sand identifying the before and a...

Blogs are the ultimate content carrier for the Internet. While they have much in common with a Web site, they are smaller than a Web site and require much less care -- most of the drudgery is performed more or less automatically once you've made a few setting adjustments. About the only thing you ...

In lots of examples like PCs, databases, and even CRM, a concept is so new (a discontinuous innovation) that there is nothing like it, which means there is no true analog to replace. The idea of replacement is fundamental because the innovation can't take over another niche. Effective use of the i...

I love it when I can find independent verification for an idea and that's what happened on Monday when Walker Information released its "2005 Walker Loyalty Report for Software and Hardware." In case you are not familiar with Walker, this Indianapolis-based company has been studying customer loyalty...

Every generation has a few seminal moments, and while a company IPO does not compare to the wars and assassinations that have typically marked a generation's coming of age, Netscape's IPO and all of the downstream bubble activity it presaged have irrevocably changed the way we all live. Before the ...

We hear a lot of talk about there not being a new, new thing to propel the industry and that sure seems true. The era that ended with the dot.com bubble bursting was one in which selling was really fun. It was a sales person's dream. Organizations couldn't get enough technology for ERP, Y2K, CRM,...

I have enjoyed reading Clayton Christensen's books on disruptive innovation and observing how many of the concepts articulated in his books have played out in the CRM market and beyond. With the theory in mind, it has been fascinating to watch as smart people have behaved in ways that are either pr...

I was on vacation when the news came out and for the life of me I could not understand why Microsoft decided to announce version 3.0 of its CRM product a few days before July 4th -- the biggest public holiday of the year -- when practically no one was looking. They weren't alone. Siebel also made a...

One of the best parts of being an analyst or a journalist is that you get pretty easy entry to some of the most interesting companies in your space. I feel particularly fortunate to be able to call up a company to ask for a briefing. Most of the time they say yes and I get to spend an hour or so o...

When I was in high school, the summer reading list included titles like "Great Expectations" which were sure to induce a coma-like state if I tried to read them while hanging out at the pool or beach. As adults we look for mindless potboiler paperbacks to stuff in the beach bag and maybe we feel a ...

The big CRM news last week was Siebel's announcement initiating a dividend for its investors. In an open letter to shareholders, CEO George Shaheen announced the 2.5 cent dividend in typical Wall Street-ese, promising that future payments would be based on a decision of the board and, obviously, on...

Whenever I think about the direction of the CRM market and of technology and business in general, my mind keeps coming back to some data I saw in The Economist magazine in April. Frequent readers might recall this graphic from an article in the April 23 edition of The Economist titled "Looking for ...

When Marc Benioff asked me in New York what I thought of last week's Salesforce.com briefing and demonstration of CustomForce, I had to tell him the truth. I was impressed but not surprised -- after all, I have been writing about this approach to new application development and integration for over...

The last two weeks have exposed me to the down side of becoming reliant on technology. It's not like we have a choice in many cases, our lives demand we split our time to enable us to multi-task and try to be in multiple places in nearly the same instant and the only way that happens is through rel...

The seasons of CRM are hard to describe but nevertheless interesting; they follow no conventional calendar and things tend to bunch up in a short time window in the spring and fall, preceded and followed by long periods of relative equilibrium. Last year I wrote about what I called the silly season...

Several macro trends are working their way through the CRM industry right now and having a direct impact on how CRM is sold. These trends include application hosting, tailoring horizontal CRM applications to fit the specific needs of vertical markets, and increasing reliance by software vendors on ...