E-Commerce Blog

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn’t introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature that helps you to do your job. You might say that such gatherings are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Last week’s Oracle OpenWorld was nothing like that.

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Oracle’s OpenWorld Revolution

The emergence of smaller, more powerful handheld devices and the spread of high-speed mobile networks have enterprise software developers scrambling to meet demand for portable versions of their flagship applications. Research In Motion got a jump on the market with the BlackBerry’s secure and reliable e-mail delivery capabilities. Competitors, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, are all vying for a share of the market. Given recent enhancements made to the iPhone, Apple has to be added to the list of contenders.

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Mobile Devices for Enterprise Apps, Part 1

Microsoft will be rolling out eight CRM “accelerators” for its Dynamics CRM product line in the second half of 2008. On the Javista blog, Microsoft’s Reuben Krippner gives readers a thorough update on what they will offer customers. On the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog, he shares information for the analytics add-on. Krippner promises to blog about each accelerator each week. Altogether, the company will release accelerators for analytics, eService, event management, enterprise search, sales methodologies, extended sales forecasting, CRM notifications and business productivity.

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Microsoft Ready to Hit the Gas on CRM Accelerators

On July 11, when Apple had barely started to sell its much-anticipated iPhone 3G, Salesforce.com became the first customer relationship management vendor to announce the availability of its mobile applications for the iPhone in Apple’s App Store. Now, two weeks after the phone’s release, a few other CRM vendors can claim some sort of iPhone 3G compatibility; many more are planning to roll out an application in the future. With the souped-up iPhone 3G and Apple’s software development kit, building sophisticated business apps is now much easier.

Source:
The New Best Hope for Mobile CRM: iPhone 3G

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow because there are so many things that we do in the front office that have not been automated and because CRM vendors like Salesforce.com have taken a lead in application development.

Excerpt from:
CRM’s Big Shadow