Software as a Service: Handling Customers, Hands-Free

Start with your sales operation. Add fast-deploying applications. Then drop the maintenance costs. Could this be a recipe for the end of software as we know it?

Still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware, labor and maintenance for in-house customer relationship management systems? Hosted CRM is not a new concept, but more and more companies are deploying the software to pump up their sales operations.

Those companies are finding cost savings in reduced maintenance fees and deployment times. They're also gaining more visibility into their sales and service operations than ever before.

Handling Customers, Hands Free
A stream of consolidation and new offerings reshaped the on-demand CRM market, pitting high-profile insurgents against some of the world's largest software makers. See how a major market research firm, a health food maker and an English consulting giant boosted their customer relationship operations with hosted software.

Vendor Profiles

Oracle: Stewarding Siebel
RightNow Technologies: Aggressive Player
Salesforce.com: Price Pushback

Also:

5 Tips for On-Demand CRM Planning
Experienced customers and insightful analysts dole out top tips for evaluating and deploying a hosted CRM system.