Heard and Overheard

"The good news is, if you're a buyer of CRM the software and services are less expensive than they've ever been." --Adam Klaber, partner, global and Americas CRM Leader, IBM Business Consulting Services "This year will be the customer satisfaction war [among vendors]; companies will be doing more due diligence before they buy." -- Brent Frei, CEO, Onyx Software "Siebel is the last best-of-breed company--there's no way they can survive. Suites always win." --Larry Ellison, Chairman and CEO, Oracle "Web services is becoming the level of interoperability we've wanted in our industry: anything working with anything else." --Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com "If your company is not customer-centric, you'll lose to the companies that are." --Phillip Kotler, Ph.D., professor of international marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University "Tom [Siebel] says in four years [UAN] will be the business we're in." -- Nimish Mehta, group vice president, UAN, Siebel Systems "What the [CRM] spending looks like now is, investments in point solutions or pieces of a footprint that are really focused on quick wins. We're calling it tactical strategies." --Elizabeth Roche, vice president, Enterprise Application Strategies, Meta Group