Forrester analyst Bill Band has just blogged about a new survey he has completed aimed at identifying the key value drivers behind CRM decisions. I must say – I was not surprised to see that sales automation tops the list, followed by customer data and marketing tools. But what is important to note is the [...]

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Government and federal agencies usually provide a nice example about the real-world issues of application deployment, such as the benefits that accrue with cloud computing and it’s new approach to computing. I recently noted that the NSA is planning on leveraging cloud computing to link a series of disparate intelligence databases into a single, and [...]

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I was reading an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times by John Zittrain and the import of the article, and a lot of the comments really echoed with what we have been saying here at Sugar about the benefits of the open cloud, namely: -A “one size fits all” model of the cloud [...]

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A lot of talk in the CRM world for the past decade or more has been around self-service and essentially taking phone-based communications out of a lot of the CRM processes in an organization. This is a good thing in a lot of areas, and for a number of cost cutting and convenience reasons. But [...]

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The economy and Web 2.0 has brought an increasing focus on what industry pundits refer to as CEM (customer experience management), or in short, the customer experience. Web 2.0 in particular has created a wealth of opportunities in this area, with new communication channels such as chat, SMS, Web self-service and knowledge bases, etc. But [...]

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When you listen to all the chatter about cloud computing, you hear a lot about there going to be one type of giant, monolithic cloud through which all services and software will be rendered. I disagree. The future of cloud computing will involve multiple clouds, giving solution providers and channel partners the opportunity to help [...]

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Things are crazy busy here at Sugar HQ – which is always a good thing, even if I am increasingly envying the European summer work ethic. But I did have a chance to see that Lithium Technologies has expanded its scope as a social community building tool to become a social CRM player. This is [...]

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In its annual CRM market share report, Gartner found that despite the current economic state we find ourselves in, CRM market revenue grew 12.5% in 2008, driven primarily by on-demand software and analytics packages. It’s a good sign, adn one that points to businesses reasserting their value in current customers during a time when purchasing [...]

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Making a CRM solution fit your business processes, and not visa versa, has been a cornerstone of CRM implementations for well over 10 years, but the concept of leveraging an application’s base functionality as a platform into other capabilities has really taken off with cloud computing. There’s a strong difference between a SaaS vendor providing [...]

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Conversations with customers I’ve recently conducted have garnered some feedback about the vendor market and providers who are simply repackaging existing products to sell or failing to deliver on promised functionality. With legacy vendors in particular you see this still being a common problem, or with companies that are acquisition happy and simply repackaging a [...]

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