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I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what they do ...

Friends in the call center software industry are telling me that they've noticed a decided pickup in their business. What's interesting about that tidbit is that these people are also saying that the interest is in on-demand solutions, and that opens a lot of topics for discussion. For example, we could look at the economic causes of this interest as well as the down stream ramifications of it. Let's do both -- first, the drivers...

Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the lead generation challenge faced by most marketers, but this approach does at least recognize the need to close a loop when a customer expresses a need and it offers a helpful solution...

The idea of the customer ecosystem is a strong one, and I believe we'll be hearing about it for the foreseeable future. The customer ecosystem is only one half of the story, in my opinion. The other half is something I call the "sales web," and the two fit together rather neatly if you know how to look. It's sort of like cutting out maps of South America and Africa and fitting them together. The best example in my mind comes by way of metaphor from the world of biology...

Last week I discussed one of the emerging hot spots in front office software, partner relationship management or PRM. This week I thought it would be interesting to take a look at another perennially emerging area -- wireless ...

After a long period in which there seemed to be little to report, PRM or partner relationship management, appears to be enjoying an upswing. PRM was an unfortunate fellow traveler with all the other 'RM' permutations that came about in the dot-com bubble. There was also eCRM, which was a distinction without a difference, and ERM in which the 'e' stood for employees. That idea has suffered much the same fate as PRM -- not totally forgotten but decidedly a backwater compared to CRM...

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Right This Second, Even for Microsoft." Greenberg makes some good points and I completely agree with him that the second quarter of 2007 is a long time to wait given the speed of evolution we have been seeing in the on-demand market...

Two things hit the wires this week relative to CRM that I think are interesting events, and in some ways they go beyond the on-demand space. Salesforce.com announced its partner relationship management (PRM) solution, and NetSuite said it will sell its product in a retail configuration. Let's go back to front ...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the saying goes, they have reliably predicted 13 out of the last 5 recessions...

Last week I mentioned a white paper I wrote a couple of years ago that addresses some of the changes we can expect to come from the on demand development and deployment paradigm and I thought it would be interesting to examine some of the main points here ...

Organizations definitely make the selection part of the process harder than need be, usually by conducting a top-down, extensive review of the systems and processes in place, Beagle Research Principal Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer Instead, what can be very effective is examin...

Some weeks there's just more to write about than other weeks. It's like the weather -- sometimes there just seems to be more of it than other times. Take last week, for example. Just north of Boston some communities received as much as 19 inches of rain -- more than you'd get from a hurricane and resembling the rainy season in the tropics. That was a lot of water and for a while, some of us thought of changing the name of our state to something more appropriate, like Panama...

Remember demand? It was always seen with supply and it was used to make markets until some wise guys told us that the two could go their separate ways. If you keep all things constant except for supply you can run the table, or so they said ...

"Salesnet excels in providing users with the sophisticated tools needed to handle more complex selling environments," Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, said "When customers need to move beyond simple contact management to standardize practices for s...

For decades Sage Software has focused on the mid-market and SMB space, selling a variety of accounting back office and CRM oriented front office applications around the world, but the company has always been something of an odd duck in the business software market ...

I am a bit of an economics junkie. My interest in the dismal science carries over from my interest in evolution and can be summarized as, why things are the way they are and how they got that way. I am currently finishing up a book that gets me where I live, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction & Economics by Paul Ormerod. This is no crackpot author, Ormerod was head of the Economics Assessment Unit at The Economist and he has taught economics at the university level. Nevertheless, perhaps another, more positive, way to look at the same phenomena is simply to acknowledge that nothing is permanent...

I wish every software marketing statement -- especially in CRM -- was as good as what they used for toothpaste when I was a kid. Thanks to Madison Avenue and having only three networks on broadcast TV, I can almost repeat verbatim the tag line about Crest from memory. "Crest has been shown to be an effective decay preventative dentifrice when used in a program of oral hygiene and regular professional care."

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling ...

Have you noticed the "dial 'O' for a human" movement gathering steam? One related manifestation is the clever set of ads put out by Citibank for its credit cards. You may have seen the ads showing a man calling for service and navigating through the tragedy that is the automated call response system so many companies use ...

Salesforce.com announced its purchase of Sendia on Tuesday in a well publicized affair that included a luncheon/press conference complete with presentation, demo and panel discussion. Some of the buzz around the announcement was a mild debate about the importance of the whole affair. After all, it was said, companies buy other companies every day, but few hold an event to highlight it. That's fair, and the natural question then is, what makes this different?...