Heard and Overheard

"Customers will choose a hosted or non-hosted CRM solution based on their own needs and strategy. One will never win out over the other completely." --Don Duszynski, vice president and managing director, Midwest, PeopleSoft Consulting, a division of PeopleSoft USA

"If you give your customers [service] choices, they will make choices that are good for them and good for the company." --Patrick O'Neal, president and CRM, Sento Corp.

"Whatever you can measure and manage your competitors can copy. What you can't copy is people. How do you measure qualities like leadership and daring?"
--Lior Arussy, president, Strativity Group

And the latest word on Web services is...
"Web services is the next big lie in CRM. It makes integration simpler, but not simple; there is still a lot of programming involved." --Zach Nelson, president and CEO, NetLedger

".Net versus J2EE is like the old Unix versus NT debate: There is no winner. It's not an issue of which companies will embrace; it's a question of which will have 60 percent share and which will have 40. In about five years we'll know.

"In three years from now Web services will be the level-zero requirement for doing business. Unless you support Web services, you won't be selling software."
--Tom Siebel, CEO and chairman, Siebel Systems

"The intersection of CRM and Web services is the one thing businesses have to be looking at right now." --Chris Selland, president, Reservoir Partners