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I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in college (yes, in Middle English and no, it wasn't that long ago), and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about springtime and renewal. This April was especially memorable in our industry, and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the things I witnessed ...

"One of the important take-aways from last year was that companies in different parts of the world do business a bit differently from those in other areas, and their CRM software must support those differences," said Denis Pombriant, principal at beagleresearch and a member of the media team for CRM Idol 2012...

Social Dynamx has just launched a new enterprise-class social customer care (social CRM) platform that will allow customer support and community management teams to identify, prioritize and handle millions of one-on-one customer social media conversations daily ...

This might be the year we look on in hindsight as the time Oracle got its groove back. It is well known that CEO Larry Ellison thinks in 10-year cycles and about how the industry seems to morph like a caterpillar about every decade. He's not the only one. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has referenced the decadal cadence, and others have too...

This is a topic I'll revisit shortly. Next Wednesday, on April 25 at SugarCon, I'll be moderating a panel on the topic of getting to the next generation of CRM with Denis Pombriant, Brian Vellmure and Craig Rosenberg. I'm looking forward to hearing what they have say, and I plan to share it with you...

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen (i.e. mobile) should take note of last week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. ...

CDC Software Corporation, an enterprise software provider of on-premises and cloud technologies, has just released Pivotal CRM for iPad, an application that enables users to access CRM information whenever and wherever they need it ...

Thanks for the overwhelming response to last week's post, "Why CRM Works." It was surprising and gratifying that so many people read and tweeted about it, given its length -- almost double my usual contribution. Since it was based on Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking work, I give all the credit to him and his great career in trying to understand how we think...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing, or how we perceive issues based on what other information surrounds them...

Customer Relationship Metrics has launched Text BI, its latest offering in its suite of managed analytics solutions. Text BI enables companies to take unstructured text-based data from surveys, emails, social media, CRM systems and other applications, and organize it into a format that makes it easier to analyze ...

Note to self: Write something nice about Microsoft Convergence 2012. They did a great job in Houston, and most importantly you can really see the CRM focus coming together with social, mobile, analytics, back office and a lot more. It's taken a long time because there are a lot of moving parts for Microsoft, but Convergence was impressive ...

If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present -- and the future -- and Jobs and Gates were only playing parts that were scripted long ago ...

M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. ...

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." ...

Yammer announced an impressive $85 million financing recently. You can get the details here ...

You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator -- with the exception of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) that subscription companies measure -- it only tells you where you've been, not where you are going ...

FirstRain, an analytics software company that provides personalized, real-time customer intelligence to sales and marketing professionals, has announced the launch of the first Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. ...

You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts. It's one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet. We're most familiar with Software as a Service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar, in fact, that I don't need to describe it for you here...

I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley, checking in with customers and would-be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK, and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course, there is a cloud -- literal and figuratively -- to go with that silver lining. After all, we're bouncing off a long fall to what's still a soft bottom...

Nimble has introduced a new Software as a Service social CRM platform designed to enable social engagement. Nimble 2.0 empowers companies to get closer to their customers through listening and engagement, helping them turn their social communities into customers for life, according to the company. Features include social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration...