Posted in CRM on Jan 31st, 2008 No Comments »
Echoing my colleague’s comments yesterday, I read an interview today in the Wall Street Journal with J.C. Penney’s CEO, Myron “Mike” Ullman III (what a name). JCPenney is planning to merge the buying and marketing operations for stores and online sales this year, cutting as many as 200 jobs and preparing for a possible recession […]
Posted in CRM on Jan 31st, 2008 No Comments »
A recent Forrester Research report from Bill Band, who is a bright guy and whom I respect a lot as an analyst, surveyed a bunch of businesses. A strong percentage said they found their CRM implementations disappointing in four key areas - marketing, customer analytics, customer service and indirect sales.
Now, there was no mention of […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 30th, 2008 No Comments »
Today, in his final visit to England as chairman of Microsoft, Gates addressed an audience of decision-makers on the subject of hosted software, and CRM in particular. Immediately after Gates’ speech, the company “officially” launched Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, which was actually announced on January 2.
During his presentation, Gates argued that “hosted software will be […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 30th, 2008 1 Comment »
So, going over the CRM stories of the day, and Destination CRM (the news site of CRM Magazine that Colin wrote for and I managed years ago) had an interesting article on Sears outsourcing its CRM operations.
Huh?
This is stupid on so, so many levels. And I know Sears is not in the best of financial […]
Posted in Application Design, Open Source on Jan 30th, 2008 1 Comment »
Matt Asay, who I read every day, blogged about how “Cloud Computing” might inhibit open source’s future development.
On this point I disagree. I think that the “cloud” concept, when used in a truly open manner - which will hopefully happen, will drive open source innovation. Sure, companies like Salesforce.com are co-opting the term - […]
Posted in Application Design, Open Source, Siebel/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards/Oracle on Jan 30th, 2008 No Comments »
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the growing importance of SOA and newer, more flexible middleware options for use within the enterprise. Recent acquisitions have certainly highlighted this, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA systems just a few weeks ago, Sun Microsystem’s acquisition of MySQL, and just yesterday SpringSource’s procurement of Covalent (see below). […]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, Open Source on Jan 29th, 2008 1 Comment »
Funny conversation I just had with an analyst…
We were talking about SugarExchange and how it supports SugarCRM as a platform play. And I was talking about some of the ways SugarCRM as a core intereaction paltform could be enhanced, mentioned that Scalix is up there for email, and LoopFuse for Marketing, etc. And the analyst […]
Posted in Open Source on Jan 29th, 2008 No Comments »
There’s been a lot of talk recently about open source acquisitions and today has proven no different. Just two weeks after Sun Microsystems gobbled up MySQL, SpringSource, an open source enterprise application player, acquired Covalent Technologies for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition brings together two open source market leaders and addresses widespread demand for a simplified […]
Posted in Application Design, SaaS on Jan 28th, 2008 No Comments »
Forrester Research has issued a new report on the increasing importance of Web 2.0 technology within the enterprise. In a nutshell, the report, entitled “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions for 2008,” predicts that the deployment of tools like blogs, wikis, and social networking within the enterprise was a growing force in the software market in […]
Posted in CRM, Microsoft, SaaS, salesforce.com on Jan 28th, 2008 No Comments »
Earlier this month I posited in a blog post that Cisco and WebEx will be our major competitors, not Salesforce.com when all is said and done.
I was thinking far down the road…but Cisco is continuing to impress me with its creation of great network pipes that will make really cool application visions possible, beyond what […]
