CRM

"You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!" -- "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" It seems painfully obvious now, but to the characters in Reese's famous candy commercials of the 1970s and 1980s, chocolate and peanut butter do actually go together quite well. In fact, what the initially...

What do these things have in common? Maybe nothing other than that the movie has a sequel and the two-dot-oh suffix is a sequel. Also, the start of blockbuster movie sequel season overlaps with trade shows like Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Sales 2.0 was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago, Enter...

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in. Enter Marketo, a startup whose raison d'etre is to get people to buy. Surprisingly -- or not, given its product lineup -- Marketo is d...

Business schools have been discussing General Motor's loss of market shar for decades already, and the added denouement of the company's bankruptcy filing will no doubt drive many academic papers for decades to come. The roots of GM's fall from grace are numerous, and it would be incorrect to attrib...

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...

Clara Shih is a friend I met through Salesforce.com. She recently published "The Facebook Era," which looks at the relationship of social networking to front office computing. She is really busy these days promoting the book, and she recently left Salesforce to pursue new ideas in social networkin...

Business Intelligence has evolved considerably in the last several years. At one time the domain of PhDs or other highly trained employees, it has become accessible to the masses. Indeed, one of the competitive differentiators among the vendors in the market -- from the huge stack players to the sma...

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level. I was there and got a sense of change happening. It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the im...

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...

The term "marketing automation" is perhaps one of the most widely used, ill-defined and ambiguous terms in the marketing and sales technology landscape. Ask 10 different people how they define marketing automation, and you'll probably get 10 different answers. Are there marketing automation solutio...

I was surprised by the mini-storm that blew up over Salesforce's apparent decision to charge ISVs, SIs and other types of developers for support using their development environment. Two primary arguments have cropped up -- one that support ought to be free, and the other that it's hard to make mone...

Mission-critical IT investments are inherently risky, even with a certified project management professional in place to guide the project. Factors like unrealistic timelines and poor planning can certainly jeopardize project success -- but could these factors be symptoms of a larger issue? Perhaps ...

Tigerpaw Software is a family-owned software company that, 24 years after it was founded, is about to enter a new phase of growth. The company's enterprise CRM, inventory and project management platform has always had a loyal following, in no small part because of the care and attention Tigerpaw lav...

I wanted to write a piece about the wisdom of crowds for a long time, but I needed a clip from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" to make it work. After a lot of procrastinating, I went to YouTube, did the hard work of reviewing all of the Python clips and found the right one. There is no limit to...

Can the privatized and anonymized be monetized? When it comes to the mega-million-name member lists of social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, Big Business really wants to know. As consumer databases go, the Facebook and MySpace lists have an appealing advantage over databases derived from ...