Enterprise Applications - eWeek

Enterprise Applications: The Evolution of CRM, SAAS and Salesforce.com


Salesforce.com marked its 10th anniversary on March 16, 2009. This year also happens to be eWEEK's 25th anniversary. An anniversary is always a good time to look back and reflect, so eWEEK Editor Debra Donston has been going through the hundreds of back issues of our publication. It was interesting to see—in covers—the evolution of CRM, what we now think of as SAAS and cloud computing, and Salesforce.com itself.
 
  • February 28, 2000
    Back when eWEEK was PC Week, the service provider platform was considered a "leap of faith."
  • April 24, 2000
    With ASPs—or application service providers—popping up like weeds, middlemen stepped in to help with the mechanics.
  • August 21, 2000
    In 2000, after PC Week had become eWEEK, the going term was a more-narrow SFA (sales force automation) rather than CRM. eWEEK Labs' tests found the then-current crop of sales management and optimization tools lacking.
  • February 19, 2001
    The woes of one ASP were seen as representative of the category at the time.
  • February 26, 2001
    Software-based CRM vendors such as Siebel offered consulting services to assist customers with the complexities associated with implementing the technology.
  • April 30, 2001
    The benefits of the ASP model were compelling, but the risk factor was significant. An eWEEK cover story provided recommendations for what to do if you banked on the wrong ASP.
  • May 21, 2001
    "e-CRM" made customer relationship management more accessible to more companies. An eWEEK Labs cover story examined the benefits of CRM and the issues IT managers needed to think about when evaluating the technology.
  • July 30, 2001
    Adoption of CRM increased and expanded globally.
  • October 15, 2001
    eWEEK urged companies to be realistic about what CRM could and couldn't do for them.
  • November 19, 2001
    An alphabet soup of service providers emerged, prompting the coinage of the term "XSP" (with X equaling "managed," "security" and so on.) eWEEK looked at the technologies that did and didn't make sense in the model.
  • February 25, 2002
    Vendors promised that hosted CRM would save big companies big money. Not so fast, we warned.
  • April 29, 2002
    In our ongoing series IT Agenda, we took a deep dive into CRM. More a process than a product, we said, CRM had to very closely align business processes and goals with technology to be truly effective. (A formula that will apply more and more often as time goes on.)
  • May 12, 2003
    eWEEK Labs put five hosted CRM solutions, including Salesforce.com, to the test in a head-to-head evaluation.
  • December 1, 2003
    Salesforce.com was an early poster child for hosted applications. This was the first time company CEO Marc Benioff appeared on eWEEK's cover, for a story about hosted CRM gaining respect in the enterprise.
  • May 31, 2004
    eWEEK Labs once again took on hosted CRM, noting the increasing maturity of the product category.
  • August 8, 2005
    In this issue, we reported that CRM was a driving force in the move toward the on-demand model.
  • January 16, 2006
    A December 2005 Salesforce.com outage begged the question: Is 99.999 percent (five nines) reliability enough? It's a question we ask more and more as the cloud model expands and companies bet their business on services such as Google Apps.
  • February 4, 2008
    In an interview with eWEEK, Benioff explained how PAAS—or platform as a service—will serve as the foundation for developers, SAAS and his own company.
  • May 5, 2008
    If an increasing number of apps are offered on the SAAS model, does the browser become the operating system? eWEEK Labs Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza tested browsers' mettle in this capacity.
  • June 16, 2008
    A June 2008 cover story examined the ways in which Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a whole new level of customer engagement.
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