There’s something of a titanic struggle going on between Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP at the moment, and the chess pieces were flying round the board in May. Salesforce wants to extend its presence in the enterprise market and sees social functionality as the means to bridge beyond its traditional CRM Continue Reading
Six implications of IBM’s replacement of Siebel with SugarCRM
April was quite a month for SugarCRM. It announced a further $33 million in funding, the release of the latest version of its CRM software, first quarter revenues up 118%, a shake-up of its reseller channel, and, to cap it all, at the SugarCon convention IBM appeared to let slip Continue Reading
More dull but effective – CRM and margin retention
A couple of weeks back I wrote about using CRM technology to support major account planning, and that while it wasn’t perhaps the most glamorous use of CRM technology, it was a very cost-effective means to increase revenues. Another one of these ‘dull but effective’ uses of CRM is in Continue Reading
Last month in CRM – CRM market news round-up April 2012
One company you couldn’t keep out of the news in April was SugarCRM. Early in the month it announced it had raised $33 million in additional funding to support ‘its advancement into the enterprise market and to pursue strategic business opportunities’. This brings the total investment in the company to Continue Reading
Dull maybe but effective – CRM and major account planning
I was working with a professional services client a few years back. As our interview process progressed a recurring theme emerged which was the gains one of their key competitors had been making in recent years. Both companies sold to large corporate customers and the competitor seemed to have developed Continue Reading
Seven reasons why Salesforce.com and Microsoft could be vulnerable
As I touched on in last week’s March CRM news round-up, the mid-range CRM market looks to be opening up a little. If you’d asked me last year I would have said that Microsoft and Salesforce.com had a stranglehold on the market, but things seem to be changing. Sugar CRM Continue Reading
CRM Market News Round Up – March 2012
The month started with a little bit of puzzlement as Salesforce.com suspended plans to build a new head office campus in San Francisco’s Mission Bay area. Salesforce cited the immediate need to accommodate its growth in head count, but the move seemed to mystify some of the financial community. There Continue Reading
Is Salesforce’s Marc Benioff becoming the new Sir Bob Geldof
There seem to be a number of interesting themes emanating from Salesforce.com’s San Francisco Cloudforce event earlier this month. The announcement of Site.com, a cloud based content management system, and Salesforce Rypple, a Salesforce and Chatter integrated version of its December acquisition, which provides a social approach to employee evaluation, Continue Reading
Sage North America’s dilemma – changing its licensing model while keeping the reseller community on board
Having speculated in my previous post that Microsoft might start offering rental pricing for its CRM software, coming on the back of SAP suggesting a third of their revenues could come from subscriptions by 2015, it appears as if Sage North America will be launching the option of subscription pricing Continue Reading
An independent perspective on Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 release
As I mentioned in last week’s CRM industry news post, when Microsoft launched Dynamics CRM 2011 early last year, they committed to a series of regular, six monthly updates. From a company whose CRM release frequency was closer to Olympian than biannual this was no small undertaking, so the preview Continue Reading