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CRM's big shadow
One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included.
I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow because there are so many things that we do in the front office that have not been automated and because CRM vendors like Salesforce.com have taken a lead in application development. It was natural for the two to come together. The front office is the last bastion of spreadsheet-based applications, and CRM vendors are providing the tools to do something about it. Moreover, as the epicenter of the on-demand revolution, the applications that modern CRM vendors enable tend to be on-demand as well. As a result, applications that are too expensive to develop for a small or diffuse market can become profitable.
Of course, as time passes, the spreadsheet applications that get turned into real applications begin to get a little distance between themselves and CRM proper. One great example is compensation management, which I think is one of the most important application areas out there, with quite a few vendors in the space including Callidus, Centive and Xactly.
