Welcome to another Friday and another edition of the CRM Week in Review. If you're tired of reading about caucuses, here's an opportunity to catch up with all things customer relationship management.
On the personnel front, Salesforce.com announced this week that Polly Sumner has joined the company as President, Platform, Alliances, and Services. She'll report to CEO Marc Benioff and oversee the technology and marketing for the company's Force.com platform, alliances with global independent software vendors and service partners, and salesforce.com's professional services organization.
Read the full article at http://www.tmcnet.com/comsol/articles/17627-crms-salesforcecom-hires-sumner-as-pas-president.htm
Salesboom.com, a vendor of SaaS CRM and ERP products, has announced it will offer two-factor authentication security to its customers. “With phishing scams on the rise,” the company says, new database security standards “ensure that your CRM database security and integrity will never be breached by phishing scams.”
Read all about it at https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/17588-crm-data-security-touted-salesboom-tfas.htm
The projected sales for SaaS CRM continue to be impressive. The market for SaaS-delivered CRM in Asia (excluding Japan) is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to a study releases this week by Springboard Research.
More details at http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/ip-communications/articles/17469-saas-crm-asia-hit-460-million-2010-springboard.htm
Consona Corporation announced this week that its KNOVA CRM solution was chosen by Yale University. Yale will implement the KNOVA knowledge management solution as part of an overall effort to more efficiently manage IT and related administrative functions across the university. Yale plans to complete an integration between the KNOVA solution and an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant service management tool set this fiscal year.
Read about it at https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/17515-consonas-knova-crm-solution-chosen-yale-university.htm
According to an article and interview written by ContactCenterSolutions's Stefania Viscusi this week, open source as a whole has grown considerably over the last year with increased value being placed on "openness." In the CRM space, this move has helped businesses to improve their customer relationship management thanks to the flexibility of open source CRM and its ability to meet changing customer demands. Open source CRM provider SugarCRM offers a cost effective, flexible alternative to proprietary applications and makes it possible to build offerings that are more useful and more powerful.
Read Stefania's interview with Chris Harrick, Senior Director of Product Marketing for SugarCRM at http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/open-source-crm/articles/17552-sugarcrm-look-open-source-crm.htm
ContactCenterSolutions's David Sims wrote this week that “efficiency” and “security” emerged as top issues on Great Britain’s IT chiefs’ agendas in 2007, based on findings from the latest edition of the Socitm annual IT Trends survey, published in December. CRM was found to be “established in most organizations, but not yet integrated with back office.” CRM integration with the back office has shown up on more than one list as a top priority for 2008, which should serve as a clear sign.
Read the full article at https://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/analysis/articles/17591-crm-established-but-not-tied-back-end-brita.htm
Interested in hosting your IVR? Yes, it can be done. And yes, it's pretty interesting stuff. Find out how interesting at http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/hosted-ivr/articles/17566-hosted-ivr-highlighted-ifbyphone-blog.htm
That's all for this week. Stay warm, CRM enthusiasts!