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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...

Combining in-memory data management, visual analytics, social networking and rich Internet applications, Software as a Service and open source software development, companies such as Advizor Solutions, Fractal Edge, Greenplum, LucidEra and others are filling what was an open niche in the BI marketpl...

Look closely at any effective customer relationship management strategy. Look beyond the technology, beyond the hype, and what will you see? What you'll see is a company that knows how to effectively communicate with its customers. Ask yourself, "What do CRM solutions actually do?" To put it very si...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

Law firms stand to gain as much as anyone from the advances being made when it comes to CRM systems, and CRM software providers are keen to fill this potentially lucrative market niche. LexisNexis, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are among the firms out there offering CRM systems specifically geared fo...

It's official. With the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is now formally a player -- a big one -- in the online CRM space. The general availability release seems almost anticlimactic, given that so many of its features and functions are the same as those in Dynamics C...

Salesforce's announcement that it would partner with Google to integrate and deliver Google Applications said more about the software industry today than it said about either company or even about the propensity of software makers to deliver Software as a Service. The software industry, like many ot...

The big CRM news of the week was Salesforce.com's tie-up with Google to embed its CRM application in the search engine provider's productivity suite. Plenty in the industry were wowed by the development -- not all, though. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu can be counted among the latter. Zoho is an on-demand ...

Etelos has released a limited beta that provides access to offline data -- a chief requirement for any on-demand vendor. The feature, called "Apps on a Plane," allows any browser-based application from the Etelos Marketplace to exchange data with any other AOP-enabled app. Last year, the firm announ...

In a year of consolidation in a hot business intelligence marketplace, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP secured leading positions in 2007. This has cleared the way for a new generation of BI specialists to emerge and take root. "We like to compare the massive consolidation we saw in 2007 to a forest c...

They may be still waiting for the first signs of the much advertised recession in the Bay Area. Everything I see here, especially this week, points to growth and all that goes with it. Multiple people have come up to me, phoned or e-mailed seeking introductions or support as they confess to having i...

On-demand applications and cloud computing often mean different things to different people. For developers, Software as a Service is quickly evolving not only as a means to deliver applications -- but as the means to develop them, too. Taking the notion of "development as a service" to its full pote...

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 ...

Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition fe...

The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact cente...