Recent Conversations With Executives Confirm Demand For Social CRM Good news! Organizations see an opportunity to tap into the proliferation of social networking channels for their CRM initiatives.  Speaking with 23 business leaders over the past 10 days, it became obvious that Social CRM initiatives were top of mind for a few reasons: Pressure from […]

Who Says Support Has To Be Bundled With Maintenance? About a decade back, vendors would offer support and maintenance as two separate line items on their contracts.  Support would run about 5 to 10% the license fee and so would maintenance.  Keep in mind, average support and maintenance fees were under 15% back then.  Here’s […]

Chatter Represents SFDC’s Unified Move Into Social Announced at the 2009 Dreamforce conference, Chatter represents both a collaboration application and platform.  Software built on the Force.com platform will gain the collaboration capabilities.   Solutions in AppExchange will be able to use profiles, real time streams, and other API’s.   With a 100 customers testing out user […]

New Changes Hint At Hasso’s Priorities In a not surprising update, SAP makes changes to Executive Board and management.  Here are the changes: Gerhard Oswald becomes COO. Gerhard has experiences in support, consulting, education, custom development, and quality.Gerhard’s contract has been extended till December 31, 2011. Point of View (POV):  Gerhard’s been a long-timer at […]

Apotheker’s Contract Not Renewed.  SAP Puts Snabe and McDermott In Co-Ceo Roles. Rumors began circulating early this weekend that Léo Apotehker’s contract would not be renewed.  The highest level sources had confirmed this early in the morning and the afternoon press release provided confirmation of the details.  A few key facts: SAP moves back to […]

IBM Adds A Leading Customer Data Integration/MDM Pioneer To Its Master Information Management Arsenal With arguably 10 master information management acquisitions since 2003, IBM continues to push towards its goal of adaptive master data management (MDM) (see Figure 1).  The recent acquisition of Initiate Systems comes after the heals of Oracle’s purchase of SilverCreek Systems […]