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I have been operating in tired mode continuously since the conventions, and by the time you read this, I may have gotten some serious sleep, though I doubt it because this is Dreamforce week after all. There have been too many things competing for my attention after dinner each evening, and none of them resembles a good book or a client. In no particular order, the list includes the Red Sox, Patriots, Republicans and Democrats. ...

You can't say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrate Facebook and Salesforce.com. ...

Last week NetSuite held a user group meeting in Boston for OpenAir, a company that they had bought earlier this year. OpenAir, if you don't know, provides an application for managing professional services engagements. When integrated with NetSuite's front and back office applications, the combination provides a lot of functionality for a professional services group. I was invited to attend CEO Zach Nelson's keynote in the afternoon, but I found out later that there was another speech that I would have enjoyed as well...

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme ...

Not that it's a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. ...

I have to admit that it's hard to concentrate on business with so many issues and crises swirling around lately. As if the presidential election was not enough, the financial meltdown is threatening an economic meltdown, and I am forever asking myself what this all might mean to CRM ...

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn't introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature that helps you to do your job. You might say that such gatherings are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. ...

The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. ...

Denis Pombriant got right to the point relating his initial impressions of the event: "Michael Phelps just did a cameo. ..." Other links to the conference:...

"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surprised by the number of hits you get. I got nearly 5 million hits the first time I searched on the term. ...

The latter can be particularly difficult to estimate, Beagle Research Group Principal Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer. "As liquid fuel becomes more expensive, you have to constantly recalibrate the numbers around the potential savings and potential opportunities." Offsetting t...

Microsoft has experienced delays in refreshing its CRM software, notes Denis Pombriant, and even skipped a whole version number as a consequence The market is likely to forgive the lapse, though, especially given the set of features the application now offers, Yankee Group ana...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting part, and I was glad to see it ...

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. Like everyone else, I will be publishing some new research this month as well, though I won't be ranking vendors this time...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. ...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesperson. I am riding today with the knowledge that this mode of travel is going to again become the standard for business travel in the years ahead...

This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted to improve the way you sell. I can remember a DOS (disk operating system) version of the product that would look almost alien in comparison to today's slick GUI (graphical user interface) version. ...

This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0 ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for US$105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering ...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. ...