Trends

"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 surpr...

Peak oil: When planet Earth reaches the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. Some say it has already happened, some believe it will within the next 50 years, and some deny the possibility all together. By any measure, though, it is ...

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. In addition to the publication of new ana...

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. I am o...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a n...

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. Good show, nice people, well run, and it was held at a swanky new Westin on the waterfront. It got me thinking, though, about the "two-dot-oh" phenomenon and how badly it needs a rethink. See, the problem -- whether we're dealing with Enter...

Having delivered on its goal of moving to a service-oriented architecture, SAP now aims to make use of that architecture as it drives innovation out to the fringes of its sphere of influence. CEO Henning Kagermann outlined in his keynote at the company's annual Sapphire conference a strategy to deli...

Results of a customer satisfaction survey released this week are timely for one industry in particular, as it faces a perfect storm: the collision of potentially stringent new regulations affecting customer service with a host of economic factors that are driving perception of that service deeper in...

The customer relationship management industry will grow by 14.2 percent this year, Gartner forecasts in a new report, with revenue expected to surpass $8.9 billion. Last year, the CRM industry registered $7.8 billion in global sales, based on preliminary revenue figures. The market is expected to co...

If you are in London on April 24th, you might want to check out the next monthly VRM Hub meeting. What is VRM, you wonder? For starters, VRM, or vendor relationship management, is the brainchild of Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Project VRM is a ...

As an executive at Callidus Software, Chris Cabrera was frustrated at the mid-market deals he often had to leave at the wayside. There were firms that basically could not afford Callidus' on-premise incentive compensation software, nor the integration and implementation costs that would accompany su...

Every year, Beagle Research Group scours the tech landscape in search of a few good companies that are developing technologies not only novel to the customer relationship management industry, but also likely to reinvent business processes in their particular niches. Denis Pombriant, principal at the...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a $54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compens...

SugarCRM will be building out its global footprint and investing in its engineering bench now that it has completed its latest round of funding. The open source customer relationship management provider just secured a $20 million package, led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing its total funding ...

It wasn't so long ago that the chief technology officer was sequestered in the IT department, cut off for all intents and purposes from the hub of enterprise power. It is different now, of course: The CTO position has grown in visibility over the last 10 years and become more closely tied to that of...