CRM is not a small market. Nor is it a niche sequestered away in a corner of the larger CRM market. CRM is a $13.045 billion industry in 2012, and it will grow to $16.694 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. No matter how you look at things, that’s a lot of money. With a projected growth of... [Read more]

Salesforce.com has unveiled a new series of cloud computing initiatives for the government user base — a highly lucrative niche for tech vendors, especially those that can present their products in a budget-friendly light. The new offerings, bundled under the name “Government Cloud,”... [Read more]

This might be the year we look on in hindsight as the time Oracle got its groove back. It is well known that CEO Larry Ellison thinks in 10-year cycles and about how the industry seems to morph like a caterpillar about every decade. He’s not the only one. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has... [Read more]

President Obama initiated an Open Government program on his second day in office, pledging to make government information more accessible to the public. Three years later, that program has achieved significant success in many forums. However, the effort of making more federal information even more accessible... [Read more]

Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new — it’s an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive... [Read more]

Kana Software has introduced a new service experience platform that combines CRM functionality with BPM, knowledge management, analytics and social listening. The application is in fact the culmination of a few years’ of effort by Kana to integrate these closely related feature sets, said Ajay... [Read more]

Every day, I meet retailers who are eager to learn how they can add a co-creation, customization, or personalization feature (collectively “Customization” with a capital ‘C’) to their existing offerings. They often start the conversation off with an overview of their current... [Read more]

“You can’t get there from here.” That’s the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions — that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there’s no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth. Logically,... [Read more]

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen should take note of last week’s acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry. It... [Read more]

Managers must overcome several complex issues to build successful digital analytics teams that can deliver on the high expectations placed on them by upper management. For one, there is currently a significant supply/demand imbalance in the digital analytics talent pool. Also, a wide range of skills... [Read more]