CRM

All is not well in venture capital land; at least, it's been a lot better. In April, the National Venture Capital Association, which works with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop industry data, reported its numbers for both fund-raising and investment, and it represents a world turned upside down. ...

CloudApps, a carbon management software company, and FinancialForce.com, which makes accounting software built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, have announced a partnership integrating their two products. The CloudApps Carbon solution is designed to allow companies to perform end-to-end carbo...

Adoption is truly the CRM killer. If your employees won't use your CRM system, your investment is an utter waste. However, the way many organizations look at adoption doesn't help matters. All too many adoption failures are attributed to the users -- those darned stubborn employees who can't be both...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage ...

A typical physician's office features several common elements: a reception area, a stack of outdated magazines, and shelves of slim file folders holding hundreds of paper medical records. The U.S. government is hoping to change one of those elements with a major initiative designed to convert all pa...

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

Sage's introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking. The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is "SaaS" or now "cloud computing," and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the defin...

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Seattle against Salesforce.com, alleging that the company infringed nine of its patents. Microsoft is seeking an injunction as well as damages. The patents touch upon a range of functions having to do with cloud-based CRM. Several f...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...

Over the years, Salesforce.com has gradually transformed itself from being a CRM company to a cloud services provider. Along the way, it partnered with leading-edge Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook, and most recently, it teamed up with virtualization giant VMware to offer VMforce, a new...

One of the frustrations of new technology is that quite often even the vendor lacks a coherent understanding of an innovation's business context. Too often we receive a new product category and the best we can say about it is that it is "cool." This should not be surprising because that's what ear...

Enterprise sales organizations are under increasing pressure, often both from internal and external stakeholders, to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue in order to better predict, and improve, the long-term health of their company. The upcoming Aberdeen benchmark report, sche...

CRM is not a technology; it's a discipline that encompasses people, processes and technology. How many times have you heard that truism? How many times have you heard it from a CRM vendor? Many times, I'd imagine -- but internalizing that concept is not as simple as it seems. Practicing a truly comp...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- ...

Siemens Enterprise Communications has announced an upgrade of its OpenScape Contact Center. The V8 release will be generally available May 18, Ross Sedgewick, senior director with Siemens' large enterprise solutions group, told CRM Buyer. The new version will provide virtualization from both the ser...