"Four out of five U.S. adults are involved in a social network," Band adds. The result: Businesses are increasingly trying to follow their customers' social networking updates. It's a logical extension of CRM, which is designed to help businesses broaden their understanding of customers' interests, needs, and concerns.
Many business relationships today begin on the Internet, as customers increasingly find businesses from Google searches, Facebook fan pages, and Website visits, adds Brent Leary, a CRM and small-business technology analyst. So it makes perfect sense to track and build those relationships using cloud CRM services, especially if they offer social network monitoring.
SAP’s recent acquisition of SuccessFactors, along with a series of other moves by various players in the software industry, suggests that the human capital management (HCM) application market is about to become the latest battlefield between established and emerging players in the rapidly evolving cloud marketplace.
The first faceoff between incumbent software vendors and the new wave of cloud-based, SaaS insurgents was in front-office applications of customer relationship management (CRM), led by Salesforce.com and collaboration tools pioneered by Google Apps.
SAP’s recent acquisition of SuccessFactors, along with a series of other moves by various players in the software industry, suggests that the human capital management (HCM) application market is about to become the latest battlefield between established and emerging players in the rapidly evolving cloud marketplace.
The first faceoff between incumbent software vendors and the new wave of cloud-based, SaaS insurgents was in front-office applications of customer relationship management (CRM), led by Salesforce.com and collaboration tools pioneered by Google Apps. The accelerating adoption of these Web-oriented, on-demand alternatives to traditional, on-premises applications opened the floodgates to a widening array of cloud solutions aimed at nearly every software industry segment, as well as a growing number of industry-specific vertical markets.