The Evolution of CRM, SAAS and Salesforce.com

Back when eWEEK was PC Week, the service provider platform was considered a “leap of faith.”

With ASPs—or application service providers—popping up like weeds, middlemen stepped in to help with the mechanics.

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.

The woes of one ASP were seen as representative of the category at the time.

Software-based CRM vendors such as Siebel offered consulting services to assist customers with the complexities associated with implementing the technology.

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.

“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.

Adoption of CRM increased and expanded globally.

eWEEK urged companies to be realistic about what CRM could and couldn’t do for them.

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.

Vendors promised that hosted CRM would save big companies big money. Not so fast, we warned.

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.)

eWEEK Labs put five hosted CRM solutions, including Salesforce.com, to the test in a head-to-head evaluation.

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.

eWEEK Labs once again took on hosted CRM, noting the increasing maturity of the product category.

In this issue, we reported that CRM was a driving force in the move toward the on-demand model.

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.

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.

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.

A June 2008 cover story examined the ways in which Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a whole new level of customer engagement.