Posted in CRM, Random on Dec 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Two days ago I entered Circuit City with the intent of making good on a gift certificate I received for Christmas. Among all the electronic retailers out there, I favor Circuit City, mostly for their competitive pricing and usually solid customer service. I say “usually” because the following experience highlighted both the best and worse […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 27th, 2007 No Comments »
It’s that time of the year for industry pundits to issue predictions for 2008, and Booz Allen Hamilton is no exception. In a new report, the consultancy issued the following five predictions for the enterprise software sector.
- A slower economy and a weak dollar will intensify cost pressures and focus on non-U.S. markets.
- The adoption […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 26th, 2007 No Comments »
When people were telling me the Nintendo Wii was going to be THE holiday gift this year, I was skeptical. After all, it has been available for some time, and there were a lot of other options : the iPod touch, iPhone, something Elmo?
But when I visited my siblings - who all have young children […]
Posted in CRM on Dec 21st, 2007 No Comments »
I just went to a nearby Citibank branch to deposit an expense check. Now, usually this is an uneventful process, but today something odd happened. I filled out what I already feel to be a needlessly complex deposit form, dealt with the teller, and got my receipt slip. When I looked over the receipt, […]
Posted in SaaS on Dec 20th, 2007 No Comments »
A recent study by IDC of Microsoft’s ISV channel partners, the company’s go-to-market strategy, notes that those partners believe that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a big opportunity. Seventy-six percent responded that SaaS will “dramatically impact the partner landscape and 70 percent of solution providers view it as an opportunity.
IDC also said that it expects more companies […]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, Open Source on Dec 20th, 2007 No Comments »
I read an interesting article in the New Yorker today - noting that online sales are still only about three percent of total holiday sales. (I don’t have a link - yes, I actually read print publications.) But it did note how the web has become an integral part of the shopping experience, during the […]
Posted in CRM, SaaS on Dec 20th, 2007 No Comments »
As an analyst, I would always ask vendors about their competitive landscape at every opportunity. What I am finding is, that vendors are a lot more diplomatic about how they view and attend to their competitive issues to analysts than they are in the trenches.
Now that I’m part of the machine, as it were, I […]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, SaaS on Dec 19th, 2007 No Comments »
I do not envy anyone tasked with designing accounting software. It’s hard work, and the system houses very critical information. So, when I saw that there were some problems with an “update” to the latest Quickbooks, it made me think. To review the issue in a nutshell - people are installing an update that may […]
Posted in CRM, Open Source on Dec 19th, 2007 No Comments »
Matt Asay recently wrote about the differences between European and U.S. adoption of open source. In a nutshell, Asay says the European governments are leading the adoption of open-source software, as they tend to respect open source more than their private-sector brethren. In North America, on the other hand, open source adoption is primarily driven […]
Posted in CRM on Dec 18th, 2007 No Comments »
It surprises me to see so many products in the CRM arena labeled as either a “sales” or “marketing” product. We have this notion that only CRM suites are “sales and marketing” tools (and usually “service” must be thrown in as well). But as we all know, sales starts with marketing, and sales feeds continued […]
