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Sage's introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking. The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is "SaaS" or now "cloud computing," and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the defin...

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Seattle against Salesforce.com, alleging that the company infringed nine of its patents. Microsoft is seeking an injunction as well as damages. The patents touch upon a range of functions having to do with cloud-based CRM. Several f...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...

The U.S. healthcare sector is about to embark on a multibillion dollar information technology investment program to provide electronic medical records for tens of millions of patients. Doctors will receive as much as $44,000 each to implement an electronic health record system, and hospitals will re...

Over the years, Salesforce.com has gradually transformed itself from being a CRM company to a cloud services provider. Along the way, it partnered with leading-edge Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook, and most recently, it teamed up with virtualization giant VMware to offer VMforce, a new...

The majority of today's contact centers employ well-designed, sophisticated self-service strategies, but even with a highly successful self-service application boasting a high call-completion rate, people will always need to talk to people. That is why there will always be a need for live service in...

One of the frustrations of new technology is that quite often even the vendor lacks a coherent understanding of an innovation's business context. Too often we receive a new product category and the best we can say about it is that it is "cool." This should not be surprising because that's what ear...

When politicians are campaigning, voters get close attention as prospective buyers and customers. After they take office, however, and are charged with actually running a government, how often do the elected officials maintain a real customer orientation to the voters? In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Purdue ...

The first point of contact between a business and its customers is increasingly a website, not a phone call or an in-person store visit. For government agencies, where store-like "walk-in" access is either difficult or unavailable -- especially at the national level -- improving customer contact t...

Enterprise sales organizations are under increasing pressure, often both from internal and external stakeholders, to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue in order to better predict, and improve, the long-term health of their company. The upcoming Aberdeen benchmark report, sche...

CRM is not a technology; it's a discipline that encompasses people, processes and technology. How many times have you heard that truism? How many times have you heard it from a CRM vendor? Many times, I'd imagine -- but internalizing that concept is not as simple as it seems. Practicing a truly comp...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- ...

Siemens Enterprise Communications has announced an upgrade of its OpenScape Contact Center. The V8 release will be generally available May 18, Ross Sedgewick, senior director with Siemens' large enterprise solutions group, told CRM Buyer. The new version will provide virtualization from both the ser...

What if you answered the phone one day to a friendly voice offering tech support for some software that had been troubling you? "Not possible," you'd say. We all know the drill with technical difficulties. We call up the software company during business hours and then sit on hold only to get an agen...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substanc...