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You have to take your hat off to Salesforce.com, I think. Last week's earnings call was a thing of beauty. It was the kind of thing that I bet every entrepreneur must dream of doing someday -- reporting to the investors on a great quarter for their newly public company ...

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear discussions of marketing ROI or to see marketing automation defined as a product set that had a lot in common with accounting...

I have been very encouraged by the flurry of activity in the sales effectiveness space. Over the last 18 months or so, emerging vendors there have taken a concept that had been around for a while and breathed new life into it ...

I got a call from a friend the other day lamenting the loss of technical IT jobs to lower cost economies. I know this is a charged subject, but I thought I would wade into it to explore what it means for CRM ...

You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (OOW), the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco represent only a small portion of the people all over the planet who know the company's products and use them in mission-critical business processes every day. More than that, it is a tribute to one man's vision of what information technology needed to become that started more than 30 years ago...

More-advanced applications are taking entirely new approaches to the sales process, generally byincorporating intelligence into the application, Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, tells CRM Buyer "Most of the improvements I have been tracking in SFA applications ar...

I keep thinking about the idea of this incubator that Salesforce.com is launching. As you know, I am a student of inflection points and I think the incubator potentially represents a very big one ...

There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however ...

A lot of people will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for Salesforce.com's annual user meeting, Dreamforce. I think I have been to every one of these events and this year marks a turning point. Previous meetings have been held in local hotels and other venues around the city but this year there is no denying it, the event is big enough to occupy at least a part of the city's biggest hall...

I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certainly gotten a lot of play, though the "SMB" and "mid-market" descriptors have also been well aired out, and, in aggregate, those two groups might outspend the enterprise today...

Someone recently asked me who I thought was ahead in the on-demand market. That's a hard one. As far as I am concerned, there are no right answers to a question like that, and though seemingly innocuous, it raises more questions than I can answer ...

I spent part of last week at a user group meeting high in the Rockies, theRightNow Summit. The term "summit" is not only figurative -- it's literal. The company is headquartered in Bozeman, Mont., another high spot on the continent, and it seems to select meeting locations near the tree line to burnish its western image. At that altitude, it's sometimes hard to breathe, which produces a perfect environment for being sedentary and listening to new ideas. In retrospect, it might have been a perfect setting...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the on-demand call center, and about how the new technology model is driving business model change. With so much happening in the call center, you might be led to believe that being a call center agent is the best job in the world. Well, maybe not the best job, I have that, but you get my meaning ...

I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what they do ...

Friends in the call center software industry are telling me that they've noticed a decided pickup in their business. What's interesting about that tidbit is that these people are also saying that the interest is in on-demand solutions, and that opens a lot of topics for discussion. For example, we could look at the economic causes of this interest as well as the down stream ramifications of it. Let's do both -- first, the drivers...

Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the lead generation challenge faced by most marketers, but this approach does at least recognize the need to close a loop when a customer expresses a need and it offers a helpful solution...

The idea of the customer ecosystem is a strong one, and I believe we'll be hearing about it for the foreseeable future. The customer ecosystem is only one half of the story, in my opinion. The other half is something I call the "sales web," and the two fit together rather neatly if you know how to look. It's sort of like cutting out maps of South America and Africa and fitting them together. The best example in my mind comes by way of metaphor from the world of biology...

Last week I discussed one of the emerging hot spots in front office software, partner relationship management or PRM. This week I thought it would be interesting to take a look at another perennially emerging area -- wireless ...

After a long period in which there seemed to be little to report, PRM or partner relationship management, appears to be enjoying an upswing. PRM was an unfortunate fellow traveler with all the other 'RM' permutations that came about in the dot-com bubble. There was also eCRM, which was a distinction without a difference, and ERM in which the 'e' stood for employees. That idea has suffered much the same fate as PRM -- not totally forgotten but decidedly a backwater compared to CRM...

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Right This Second, Even for Microsoft." Greenberg makes some good points and I completely agree with him that the second quarter of 2007 is a long time to wait given the speed of evolution we have been seeing in the on-demand market...