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I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Right This Second, Even for Microsoft." Greenberg makes some good points and I completely agree with him that the second quarter of 2007 is a long time to wait given the speed of evolution we have been seeing in the on-demand market...

Two things hit the wires this week relative to CRM that I think are interesting events, and in some ways they go beyond the on-demand space. Salesforce.com announced its partner relationship management (PRM) solution, and NetSuite said it will sell its product in a retail configuration. Let's go back to front ...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the saying goes, they have reliably predicted 13 out of the last 5 recessions...

Last week I mentioned a white paper I wrote a couple of years ago that addresses some of the changes we can expect to come from the on demand development and deployment paradigm and I thought it would be interesting to examine some of the main points here ...

Organizations definitely make the selection part of the process harder than need be, usually by conducting a top-down, extensive review of the systems and processes in place, Beagle Research Principal Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer Instead, what can be very effective is examin...

Some weeks there's just more to write about than other weeks. It's like the weather -- sometimes there just seems to be more of it than other times. Take last week, for example. Just north of Boston some communities received as much as 19 inches of rain -- more than you'd get from a hurricane and resembling the rainy season in the tropics. That was a lot of water and for a while, some of us thought of changing the name of our state to something more appropriate, like Panama...

Remember demand? It was always seen with supply and it was used to make markets until some wise guys told us that the two could go their separate ways. If you keep all things constant except for supply you can run the table, or so they said ...

"Salesnet excels in providing users with the sophisticated tools needed to handle more complex selling environments," Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, said "When customers need to move beyond simple contact management to standardize practices for s...

For decades Sage Software has focused on the mid-market and SMB space, selling a variety of accounting back office and CRM oriented front office applications around the world, but the company has always been something of an odd duck in the business software market ...

I am a bit of an economics junkie. My interest in the dismal science carries over from my interest in evolution and can be summarized as, why things are the way they are and how they got that way. I am currently finishing up a book that gets me where I live, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction & Economics by Paul Ormerod. This is no crackpot author, Ormerod was head of the Economics Assessment Unit at The Economist and he has taught economics at the university level. Nevertheless, perhaps another, more positive, way to look at the same phenomena is simply to acknowledge that nothing is permanent...

I wish every software marketing statement -- especially in CRM -- was as good as what they used for toothpaste when I was a kid. Thanks to Madison Avenue and having only three networks on broadcast TV, I can almost repeat verbatim the tag line about Crest from memory. "Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventative dentifrice when used in a program of oral hygiene and regular professional care."

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling ...

Have you noticed the "dial 'O' for a human" movement gathering steam? One related manifestation is the clever set of ads put out by Citibank for its credit cards. You may have seen the ads showing a man calling for service and navigating through the tragedy that is the automated call response system so many companies use ...

Salesforce.com announced its purchase of Sendia on Tuesday in a well publicized affair that included a luncheon/press conference complete with presentation, demo and panel discussion. Some of the buzz around the announcement was a mild debate about the importance of the whole affair. After all, it was said, companies buy other companies every day, but few hold an event to highlight it. That's fair, and the natural question then is, what makes this different?...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service (SaaS), market ...

Many companies in industries such as technology need to work hard to gain and retain customers. People already have cell phones, iPods and computers, but because the fantasy sports phenomenon is still somewhat new, we are still in an early market situation. It is a sellers' market to be sure, according to Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy...

I don't do endorsements -- that's for ball players. For me to endorse a product would be the end of my credibility. All I look for is what works and, if it does, I'll point it out. If something doesn't live up to the hype, I follow my mother's advice and say nothing. That's why I was surprised when someone brought to my attention a borderline situation in which a vendor did its best to imply my endorsement against its rival, Salesforce.com...

I was doing research for a white paper not long ago and it gave me reason to speak with people who operate call centers. The call center operators I spoke with had one thing in common; they used on-demand call center services. If you are not familiar with on-demand call center services, it's much like on-demand anything else -- like sales force automation -- but it seems the impact is greater. Let me explain...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest this invasion of my space? ...

I take between three and seven briefings each week from software companies. Some of these companies are known quantities that I like to keep up with, while others are new to me or possibly new to the world. Most times, companies are looking for an objective opinion on a plan, a message or an idea -- and they figure there's always a chance I might mention them here. That's certainly happened, though I am afraid my track record seems to run in the other direction. I am frequently critical, so be careful what you wish for...