The 2008 CRM Market Awards: Table of Contents and Introduction
Recognizing excellence in the CRM industry is as much an honor for us as it is (we hope) for the recipients. With the seventh annual CRM magazine Market Awards, we take note of the industry’s mainstays as well as its newcomers, the expected along with the surprising.
The content this month reflects the very best that the CRM industry has to offer—from vendors to customers, channel partners to analysts. We profile Influential Leaders and Rising Stars, and reveal the results of our comprehensive survey of 10 industry categories—including new categories for incentive management and open-source CRM. And, wrapping up the Awards package is our Elite section, capturing a quartet of exceptional CRM implementations. That, after all, is what we’re here to cover—not just once a year, but every month in the pages of the magazine.
Please join us in congratulating all the leaders, winners, and honorees. --The Editors of CRM magazine
2008 Influential Leaders:
Nine members of the CRM community were named by the magazine as 2008 Influential Leaders:
* Kevin Bandy, a partner at consultancy Accenture;
* Josh Bernoff & Charlene Li, longtime industry analysts and authors of Groundswell;
* Des Cahill, the CEO of Habeas (which was just acquired by Return Path);
* marketing guru Seth Godin;
* industry thought leader Paul Greenberg (who is also a columnist for the magazine);
* Bill McDermott, president and CEO of SAP Americas & Asia Pacific Japan;
* Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet (the parent company of Zoho); and
* Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
2008 Rising Stars:
The magazine also named eight Rising Stars for the year:
* Apple, a burgeoning player in the industry;
* Marketo, a software firm bridging sales and marketing;
* platform developer nGenera (which recently acquired Talisma);
* Ribbit, a provider of voice services (recently acquired by BT);
* social-networking developer Trampoline Systems;
* the microblogging site Twitter; and
* billing-as-a-service providers Aria Systems and Zuora.
2008 CRM Elite:
The magazine named four customer implementations as winners of its CRM Elite Award:
* Qualcomm, for a mixed deployment of EchoSign and Salesforce.com;
* VisionShare, for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment with Axonom;
* the Toledo Mud Hens, for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment with First Tech Direct; and
* Ice Energy, for an initiative with JangoMail.
And, without further ado:
2008 CRM Market Leaders:
With this year’s awards, the magazine expanded its scope to a record 10 categories. In each, the magazine named one Market Winner, denoting the highest score compared to its peers. Each category also produced four Market Leader awards and a “One to Watch.” Recipients were determined through an extensive three-month process and proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.
The 2008 CRM Market Awards were presented at the destinationCRM 2008 Conference at the Marriott Marquis in New York. An expanded version of the results is available in digital NXTBook format (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm0908/index.php).
Every month, CRM magazine covers the customer relationship management industry and beyond. To subscribe, please visit http://www.destinationcrm.com/subscribe/.
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