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On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog. "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you s...

The new year is here and marketers are putting the finishing touches on their budgets and plans for 2008. However, before we move forward, there are some trends from 2007 that are worth continuing in the coming year. One trend that is top of many minds is the increased focus on customer relationship...

Return on investment figures for a Software as a Service implementation can be surprisingly difficult to generalize. One measure often cited in the industry is that one year is a reasonable period in which firms can expect to see a project deliver returns, with the larger-sized investments bringing ...

2006 was the last year e-commerce vendors introduced new functionality to their Web sites that were visible to consumers, such as better search features and click-once-to-buy shopping carts. Coincidentally or not, it was also the last time aggregate customer satisfaction with online retailers regist...

Was it the "Year of the Frustrated Customer?" Here are a few highlights: Airline passenger complaints to the U.S. Department of Transportation were up 70 percent, as last summer saw the worst delays in 13 years of record-keeping; Verizon was ordered to pay $1 million to customers the company termina...

The pressure to increase top-line revenue growth is uniting sales and marketing executives to focus resources on aligning their two groups. In October, Aberdeen Group surveyed over 250 companies to identify the strategies, capabilities and enablers that Best in Class companies are using to improve s...

In the ultimate game of bait-and-switch, several Web sites try to pass off a bot as a bod. That is to say that Live Chat is offered to users, but there's no flesh-and-blood person on the line, there's only a chat bot making a robotic guess at what the user might want to know. Few are fooled by the s...

The familiar adage that the consumer is always right has taken on a new meaning in the Internet age. Rather than talk with a store manager, consumers are now making their feelings about different products known on message boards and blogs. "Many companies tried to ignore the online forums, but most ...

It is difficult to avoid the talk of a potential recession in 2008. Even firms whose product set or market niche are well-suited for tight times don't like the thought of slow sales and bleak economic forecasts. RightNow Technologies, an established Software as a Service CRM vendor, is one of those ...

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 ...

Not too long ago, advice to keep a CRM implementation simple would have focused around due diligence for the application. It would have focused on negotiating the best deal with a systems integrator. Most of all, it would have focused on a clear needs assessment driving the application. That was the...

When the last of the ribbons float to the ground and the mountain of wrapping paper is folded up for recycling, chances are that most households will have at least a couple of gift items that don't quite fit the bill. Many gift recipients will be among the mob that hits the malls in the days after C...

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...