Archive

As Microsoft once again renews its efforts to target small to mid-sized companies, many in the software industry express skepticism, while others welcome the competition. Just how committed is Microsoft to the small to mid-market software segment? As many critics will point out, this is not the firs...

It seems so many companies are finding it easier than ever to automate, speed up, and turbocharge their way into mediocre performance with customers all because they don't stop to re-define the essence of their strategies for attracting, selling to, and serving customers in the first place. What's n...

In lots of examples like PCs, databases, and even CRM, a concept is so new (a discontinuous innovation) that there is nothing like it, which means there is no true analog to replace. The idea of replacement is fundamental because the innovation can't take over another niche. Effective use of the i...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It's going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent thems...

I think 2005 was a bit of a false spring for many software companies. Although many enterprises moved to take advantage of new revenue opportunities, those actions did not filter down to emerging companies with the ideas and technologies the big guys need to achieve their vision. In fact, articles...

Oracle has changed the formula it uses to determine the cost of software licenses for multi-core processors, the company announced. In July, it began counting each core as .75 of a whole, but it will now use different formulas based on the specific chips in use. The majority of buyers purchase lice...

With 2005 nearly done, it's interesting to look at the lessons learned and insights gained in customer relationships overall and CRM's response to them specifically. A seismic shift is happening in CRM today. Foremost of these is the shift from transactions to trust -- and if your pipeline has been ...

The rising cost of fuel is prompting thousands of federal government workers to consider the benefits of teleworking -- either working from home or at an offsite location closer to home. A recently published study titled, "Fuel Smart Economy: It's No Gas," that examined the cost of the daily commute...

Ever notice how these year end reviews and a pundit's previous forward-looking prognostications rarely synch up? Of course not! Analysts and pundits are great at predicting the future, but lousy at coming back a year later to review how they did. Well, I'm different. I don't care if I was wrong ...

A silent stealth war is going on between best-of-breed vendors for position in the Google AdWords column of searches on keyword searches, and a strategy on the part of larger best-of-breed vendors of completing dominating their smaller best-of-breed counterparts in AdWord spending alone. This war fo...

It really should not surprise me, though it does, that the media companies have such lousy Web sites. Here's what surprises me: It's a secret hidden in plain sight that the newspaper business is in trouble, yet papers seem to be supremely ineffective at doing something about the situation. Sellin...

Microsoft's latest CRM release takes a giant step from previous versions, adding several key functions to its Dynamics CRM 3.0. Although the company said the new version will be more competitive with CRM giants Oracle and SAP, one analyst said Microsoft is still playing mostly in the small and mediu...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within ...

It's time to start thinking about what comes after CRM. I am not trying to be alarmist or to set a dire tone, I just think there's a good amount of evidence that CRM has taken us as far as it's going to and we need to think about something beyond it. That's not to say that CRM is dead -- far from i...