Businesses will start implementing large company-wide customer relationship management (CRM) projects this year, says analyst Gartner.
Between 2001 and 2004 more than 95 per cent of CRM projects concentrated on specific areas such as sales force automation, but Gartner believes 10 per cent of all CRM projects will be cross-departmental this year – double the 2005 [...]

In the future, vendors with the ability to provide a full suite of on-demand services, on the most reliable network with the greatest efficiency, either by building it themselves or acquiring and consolidating software from other on-demand vendors, will be the winners of the on-demand software battle.

How midsize businesses can avoid the pitfalls of enterprise systems.
Imagine trying to return a shirt, only to be told by the clerk that not only does the store not accept returns, but that he’s going to force you to buy all your clothes from him for the next five years even if they go [...]

Some acronyms never die, even if in many ways their time has come and gone. CRM – or customer relationship management - is one such dinosaur.
To be sure, working more closely with customers is something that every company wants to do more of, and lots of software and services are being bought with that [...]

It’s a good problem to have: huge customer usage of an online service. This happened with such industry-disruptive companies as Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY).
Recently, the same thing happened to Salesforce.com (Nasdaq: CRM). Thankfully, the company has taken swift action to remedy its infrastructure so as to handle the traffic surge. In fact, [...]

Integration across operating locations of all sizes has become increasingly important in the age of globalization and increased competition. The reasons are clear: reducing costs, optimizing processes, and gaining a single, unified view across all company-wide information.
While end-to-end business software solutions are helping to integrate data, systems, and business processes within large enterprises, many [...]

HOSTED applications represent the fastest growing segment of the customer relationship management market, and this trend will accelerate with the recent release of an on-demand application by German enterprise software maker SAP.
In 2005, analyst Frost and Sullivan says, revenue from hosted CRM applications in Australia totalled $13.2 million, or 13 per cent of total CRM [...]

So, you’ve decided to make the move to a hosted CRM solution. If you’re like most companies, you’ve spent the bulk of your evaluation on features and benefits, and rightly so. But as important as those are, I strongly suggest you carefully review the agreement you’ll need to sign, and look for a few missing [...]

For CRM, 2005 was a bumpy ride. Major players in the customer-relationship management field engaged in a slew of mergers and acquisitions, buying competitors of every size — think of Oracle’s purchases, Siebel among them — and while the industry endured this cannibalism, spending on applications and related services and technologies was relatively modest.
Now [...]

For years enterprises have tried to combat customer service issues with technology.
In some cases, the organizations do not have a central location to keep all of a customer’s data. The e-mail requests are stored in one location while records of phone conversations are located someplace else. When this happens the call center manager approaches [...]