The high level of mergers and acquisitions in the CRM market will
continue through 2008, research firm Gartner predicts, with one in three CRM software vendors involved
in such a transaction each year.

There has already been a series of very high profile M&As in the
space, of course, including Oracle’s acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel. These transactions led [...]

Mobile CRM technology — long hailed as the solution to keeping
mobile sales and field service staff connected and armed with
up-to-date information, only to see disappointing returns — is now
grabbing the attention of Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors.

Last week, San Francisco-based Salesforce.com released new mobile functionality based on its acquisition of Sendia, a one-time partner [...]

MARC Benioff has been up since the early hours feeding his Microsoft
obsession. The Salesforce.com boss has learned that Steve Ballmer is
boasting he’ll take him on at his own game with Live CRM, a web-based
application similar to Salesforce’s flagship offering.

Benioff has already fired off an early morning email to all staff
noting with some glee that Microsoft [...]

When business software giant SAP recently released its first Internet-based customer relationship management product, Marc Benioff, the brash founder and CEO of leading “hosted” CRM provider Salesforce.com, is sure to have scoffed.

Will 2006 be the year that mobile CRM finally takes off? So far, all signs point to an impending launch.
CRM vendors are readying for the countdown by purchasing or partnering with mobile technology firms. And analysts are generally optimistic of clear weather ahead. For example, Gartner expects continued strong annual growth in mobile CRM [...]

In 1999, the idea of renting software over the Internet was dismissed by many in techdom as little more than a marketing ploy cooked up by Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff. At the time, the outspoken exec was operating in the shadow of software giants Oracle and Microsoft and fighting to get his nascent company [...]

Customer relationship management (CRM) is grabbing the attention of business leaders who wish to instill customer-centric business models. Their concern, however, is how to determine what the value of CRM is both for their organizational effectiveness as well as for their customers. Value chain management (VCM), which focuses on value creation and process optimization, offers [...]

O2 Interactive, the homebuilder customer management systems vendor, has announced their release of version 3.0 of OnSite CRM.
OnSite CRM provides a "full life cycle of customer management for residential homebuilders and design centers," company officials say, and Version 3.0 now includes a wireless BlackBerry interface, interactive flooring and electrical editors, geographic prospect analysis, and external [...]

With the rollout of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CRM 3.0 now underway, expectations are running high that this is the version that will finally push Microsoft far into the small and medium-sized (SMB) CRM vendors’ turf.
"This is the first time Microsoft CRM is ready for prime time," Yacov Wrocherinsky, president and CEO of Infinity told CRM [...]

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 [...]