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Since launching the WizKids report four years ago, Denis Pombriant, principal at the firm, has rarely failed to impress with his lists of standouts. Before they became household names in the industry, he spotlighted Salesforce.com, RightNow andFive9, to name just a few examples...

Sometime between Groundhog Day and the Final Four each year, we try to publish a short report that showcases some of the brightest emerging companies in front-office computing. We call it the "WizKids Report," and we present the companies in the report with a small award. At times, companies who have felt they deserved the recognition of a WizKids award but who did not receive one have referred to it as "Passover."

Microsoft missed a prime opportunity to tell its Web 2.0 story even as it continues to refine its CRM product, Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "Microsoft has a very serviceable CRM 1.0 product," Pombriant said. "However, in a world that is increas...

Microsoft Convergence is a very large show. Last week in Orlando, Fla., there were in excess of 9,500 people, most from outside of the United States, and by that measure alone it was a successful event. Convergence is one of Microsoft's chances to meet face to face with its partners and customers for the usual mix of training, new product announcements and the like, and I went hoping to learn more about the company's continuing effort to field a relevant CRM solution...

The emphasis on features and tools did a disservice to the application because it focused too much on its CRM 1.0 creds, Denis Pombriant, founder and principal of Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer. "This would have been a good opportunity to talk about CRM 2.0 and what Microsoft has planned for that."

You might be tooling down the information superhighway right now in your cool new hybrid SaaS-mobile (Software as a Service), wondering what that thing is in the rearview mirror that's beginning to gain on you ...

Oracle's message is that Web 2.0 is now part of the CRM family, Beagle Research founder Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer. "You talk to [Oracle executive Anthony Lye] and you get a sense he is all over Web 2.0 and social networking and what it means for the CRM industry." To be s...

A community, aka "community of interest," is usually thought of as a large group of people with some common reason for associating. These days, that usually comes down to the user group, but in practice, a community can be any group that is passionate about a product or service and wants to improve it ...

Earlier this month SugarCRM announced that it had secured US$20 million in a new financing round, bringing its total funding so far to $46 million -- a significant accomplishment for several reasons ...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz ...

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times ...

It was a man-bites-dog story in the summer of 1999. An interesting headline at Red Herring on July 30 read: "Head Count: Salesforce.com gets Larry's blessing." Marc Benioff was leaving Oracle to start Salesforce.com, and Larry Ellison was not only giving his blessing, he was going to pony up some capital to get the company running. In exchange, Ellison got a board seat and a bit of controversy when Oracle launched a competing product. However, that's not the focus of this story...

I was speaking with a CRM vendor the other day about positioning and messaging for sales force automation. The vendor was telling me that the company wanted a back-to-basics message that would focus on the importance of SFA (sales force automation) in helping salespeople recover some of the time they invest in unproductive activities ...

The lower prices deliver many ancillary benefits. With the introduction of lower-cost-per-port speech engines and new competitively priced servers, the price of providing CRM applications goes down -- sometimes quite dramatically. "With VoIP, companies can justify installing CRM systems for smaller workgroups and in more remote locations," said Denis Pombriant, a principal with Beagle Research...

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, once began a conference in San Francisco with a surprise keynote address by a George W. Bush impersonator, so when I was invited to this week's "Tour de Force" announcement I had inklings that we might see a facsimile of the New French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, or possibly get a glimpse of his new 40-year-old, ex-supermodel, tire-heiress girlfriend, Carla Bruni...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just musings on how it went down ...

Denis Pombriant: You and your writing partner James Gilmore have been responsible for introducing some important ideas into the business world, like mass customization and the experience economy. How do you come up with ideas like that? Joe Pine:...

In a new report by Beagle Research,Managing Principal Denis Pombriant outlines the unintended benefits -- or the applications' intangible strengths -- that SaaS is bringing to customers. The report is based on conversations with CEOs at top SaaS vendors including Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite; RightNow's Greg Gianforte; Mike Braun, CEO of IntAcct; Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM at Oracle; Brian Zanghi, CEO of Kadient; Michael Torto, CEO of Centive; David Thompson, head of Genius.com; Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com; Mike Bauer of Intacct; and Brian Halpin, vice president and general manager of SageCRM...

There is a huge CRM lesson embedded in the results of the Iowa caucuses, and it has almost nothing to do with which on-demand CRM application a candidate used to track everything ...

There is a big difference between a forecast and a resolution, and the former is easier to make than the latter ...