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Last week Salesforce.com marked its 10th year in business. To celebrate, the company held a conference call to discuss its earnings, and CEO Marc Benioff brought presents for his investors ...

This latest wave of innovation has given SugarCRM a significant boost, Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer SalesLogix 7.2

Oracle continued its fast-following ways last week when it introduced additional functionality for Oracle On-Demand Release 16. The statement completed a two-part announcement begun the week before and brings to eight the number of new on-demand CRM applications from the company ...

Their value, though, is clear. "There is a lot of data stored in a variety of places -- whether in third-party social networks or CRM databases," Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, told CRMBuyer. "It is very helpful to be able to seamlessly access the information as if it were all part of one database."

While few businesses are exactly sure how to maximize their social networking features, most are aware they cannot ignore these sites. Facebook has more than 150 million users, and LinkedIn has more than 35 million business professionals using its network. Daily, millions of individuals log onto these sites to express themselves. "Companies are constantly trying to understand what their customers are thinking and how they are feeling," Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group, told CRM Buyer. "Because social networking sites have become repositories for their thoughts and ideas, businesses are trying to tap into these sites."

The recession is ahead of our thinking about how to sell around it. Our first response is a tried and true strategy that is not right for all occasions. People will disagree with me, but so far we've seen a steady stream of one idea -- staying close to the customer and attending to the customer experience ...

Enter Zuora. Not quite a year old, it can count itself among the first vendors to target the back-end needs of SaaS companies, Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer Zuora made its official debut in May 2008 with an online billing application for SaaS pr...

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere (and I am tempted to write that word without the 'K') started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in ...

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. ...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision ...

I have been writing about communities for many years, and it seems like a particularly good topic for the interesting times we live in, to borrow a Chinese phrase. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this is a perfect time to engage in community building, but there is a lot of ambiguity built into that statement, so today I will attempt to clarify ...

Happy New Year! Let's be counterintuitive for a moment, shall we? ...

What a great time to be thinking about the future. Seriously ...

I don't know about you, but I will be happy to write "The End" on the chapter we call 2008. Normally, at the end of a year I look back at some of my predictions from a year earlier and look for some indication that I was on track at least some of the time. This year is different. Who cares, really -- the big story in the economy was on no one's radar that I know of...

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a white paper that resonated around the industry like a three-point shot clanging off the front of the rim as time expired. A "brick," in the vernacular of basketball; nonetheless, I view it as some of my finest work. ...

Expansion of broadband was supposed to take place during the Clinton administration, Denis Pombriant, managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, told the E-Commerce Times "Clinton gave the vendors a US$25 billion tax cut to support the effort, but they never did anything...

We can all read the news. Credit is frozen, or nearly so, and the federal government is laboring mightily to get credit flowing again. Unfortunately, here in the U.S. as well as in other places, like the UK, banks have become averse to doing business. The news reports I read say that after being too lax, many banks are being too strict in their lending policies and are sitting on the cash that governments have given them to lend. What can CRM do here?...

I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. ...

It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in some quarters where you might not expect innovation or creativity...

A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By process of elimination hybrid won out simply because we could not conclude that the show was anything else.