Let’s discuss a couple of the heavyweight C words in the IT Sector: cloud and customer relationship management (CRM).

What do they have in common?

Well they have both certainly provoked a lot of press coverage and airtime; both have driven large brand name vendors to jump in with big investment, acquisitions and marketing hype; both have helped drive each other’s growth and both certainly have had customers debating what and when they should elect to use such a solution.

CRM has been a hyped acronym for many years and can mean many things to many people. Many debates abound in this area from if it is the correct terminology to describe what its used for, to how much does it really cost, to what ROI can really be achieved.

The fundamentals are though that a way to manage customer information, share it securely, track customer interactions and …