Trends

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers. I got to thinking about this after watching the movie "Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finc...

John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM, is no stranger to the proprietary software that delivers most of the CRM functionality in the market today. The Washington, D.C.-native moved to Silicon Valley in his twenties and spent 12 years in the "trenches" as he puts it, developing products for ente...

Now general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Brad Wilson's career trajectory has allowed him to deliver CRM to the market from many different vantage points -- and levels of resources. Wilson began at HP as a database software architect, moving into product management and marketing after a few yea...

Mike Betzer was working for MCI several years ago when he realized that if the company could use the Internet as a front end, it could leverage the software in the data center and develop a network-based application that could be sold to other companies doing essentially the same thing that MCI did ...

NetSuite has sold 6.2 million shares to investors in a Dutch auction this week, raising a healthy $161 million. The haul from its long-awaited initial public offering came in spite of -- or perhaps because -- its moving target price. NetSuite ultimately debuted at $26 per share, after jumping from a...

Several years ago when Salesforce.com burst onto the CRM scene, it was difficult to imagine how the upstart firm could make a dent in the space. At the time, the gorilla in the room was Siebel and the thought of an Internet-based application -- an experimental delivery mode then -- besting the deepl...

One of the most complex areas of online advertising -- what happens when a prospective customer clicks on an ad -- ironically happens almost entirely outside of the customer's awareness. The ubiquitous dancing Santa, robot or alien that we see on so many mortgage refinancing ads actually is only the...

Few industries in this online era can lay claim to a longer or more venerable history than newspapers can -- but today, it's no secret that newspapers are in trouble. The rise of the Internet has wrought changes to the competitive landscape that are drawing away both readers and advertisers, leaving...

Channel partner opportunity management firm BlueRoads announced on Sept. 17 a new lead referral module designed to help vendors gain strategic insight into the management of better sales channel yield. The new software module captures new referrals from a vendor's extended partner community and harn...

Just a couple of weeks ago, two terms, on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS), were used interchangeably -- it was truly a difference without a distinction -- but a lot has changed in a short time. First, Salesforce.com introduced Force.com, and a day later SAP announced a long awaited on-demand...

With an eye toward minimizing its carbon footprint, Wal-Mart Stores will partner with the Carbon Disclosure Project to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain. An initial pilot project will focus on seven commonly used product categories -- DVDs, toothpaste, ...

Although some people are still trying to enjoy the last of the summer weather, the retail holiday shopping season has begun. With that, inevitably, comes the peak e-mail marketing season. The holiday e-mail season started last year on Sept. 6 with a Christmas reference in a Sam's Club e-mail, accord...

My last few columns have been focused on new technologies that are making their way into the broader CRM suite. Expanding the CRM suite has never been easier, as platform vendors like Salesforce.com provide all the capabilities necessary for innovative developers to add something to the ensemble. He...

Dave Duffield, most famously the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday, was giving a keynote presentation at the RightNow user conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., when it hit me. Duffield is about to become a kingmaker in the on-demand market. Please forgive the apparent hyperbole and continue.

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum. It's hard to believe th...