Posted in CRM on Mar 13th, 2009 No Comments »
The fact that Gartner, in its latest report, says the basic ideas, goals, and challenges of CRM will remain unchanged through the next decade tells me one thing: CRM is still about the people and less about the technology. I don’t find that conclusion surprising at all. It’s hard to imagine, but I think the [...]
Posted in CRM, social media, web 2.0 on Mar 12th, 2009 No Comments »
I’ve blogged about Hulu and what I like to call marketing 2.0 in the past. This week Hulu once again provided a great example of how savvy companies are employing social networking and other online-assisted initiatives to turn a pretty penny. The company today launched Hulu Friends, which lets users invite friends from your e-mail [...]
Posted in Application Design, cloud computing, Google, SaaS, salesforce.com on Mar 12th, 2009 1 Comment »
Reading over the IT Project Failures blog over at ZDnet, the debate over the viability of cloud-based applications came up. Of course, it is the usual “universal outages” issue that gives people pause. The main issue is that it has taken the biggest SaaS/Cloud companies – Salesforce.com, Google etc. many years to get to where [...]
Posted in CRM on Mar 12th, 2009 No Comments »
When you spend enough time on the vendor side of CRM, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that all too often, CRM systems do not perform at optimal levels becuase of very NON-technology related issues. This blog post made me laugh, but also reminded me that the human element can not be [...]
Posted in Open Source on Mar 11th, 2009 No Comments »
The continued acceptance and penetration of open source applications within the enterprise, and the resulting growth of vendors like ourselves, has lead to an increasing number of market partnerships. We saw it ourselves last year, as have many other open source application providers and infrastructure players. This trend really started to reach critical mass in [...]
Posted in Application Design, cloud computing, social media, web 2.0 on Mar 11th, 2009 2 Comments »
I am not talking about green initiatives here. This is about all those annoying little “apps” and widgets you get when trying to actually connect with someone on Facebook, or whatever social networks you may be using. Right now, there are a bazillion little applications all over the web, some cool, some useless. And while [...]
Posted in CRM, social media, web 2.0 on Mar 10th, 2009 No Comments »
There is a good article up over at TechCrunch about the power of Blogs now that Twitter has somewhat made reaching out even easier, chipping away the authority of blogs 140 characters at a time. (And you have to see great response to the article by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld.) My take is that blogging is blogging, [...]
Posted in CRM, web 2.0 on Mar 10th, 2009 2 Comments »
I was speaking with more customers today for sales reference calls, including one customer that operates in the healthcare/pharmaceutical industry. Industry-related CRM issues abounded during the conversation, including that of branding. My mother works for a doctor’s office, and I hear stories of the office being bombarded by nearly as many sales reps as needy [...]
Posted in cloud computing, CRM, SaaS, SugarCRM on Mar 10th, 2009 No Comments »
I was looking over some research at Ovum that discussed the concept of the “local cloud.” The initial take is that local and the cloud are not necessarily terms you would put together. But I would argue the opposite. In a truly open cloud, there are various flavors. The public clouds will be far-reaching and [...]
Posted in Application Design, SaaS, web 2.0 on Mar 9th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’ve been knee deep in sales references today (always a good problem to have) and during the course of several conversations with customers came across some fodder for today’s blog. Specifically, we were talking mashups. It seems there has been genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting [...]
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