The 2010 CRM Market Awards - Introduction

Nowhere to go but up.

That cliché's trotted out whenever something "hits bottom," but this recession, which we've only begun crawling out from, has taught us a 21st-century inverse: "Too big to fail." No one expects the size of the CRM industry to preclude failure; instead, as it turns out, it's just the right size to generate success.

As the arrows on this page — and throughout this month's issue — are meant to symbolize, moving up sometimes involves a little creative destruction, breaking through the bottom of something else.

In this ninth annual edition of the CRM magazine Market Awards, each recipient — vendors and customers, channel partners and analysts, familiar names and newcomers alike — is upwardly mobile in some way, and we pack all those accomplishments into the following 27 pages.

We applaud Influential Leaders, anoint a few Rising Stars, induct a true heavyweight into the CRM Hall of Fame, and reveal the results of our comprehensive survey of 10 industry categories. The final arrow in our quiver? The Elite section, a quartet of exceptional CRM implementations. Please join us in congratulating all the leaders, winners, and honorees.

— The Editors of CRM magazine

 

NEW YORK, August 2, 2010 — CRM magazine, the industry's leading publication, announced the winners of its 2010 CRM Market Awards here today, in conjunction with the magazine's CRM Evolution 2010 conference.

With its ninth annual CRM Market Awards, CRM magazine honors the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies that focus on customer relationships and the customer experience through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies. In each of 10 categories, the magazine named one Market Winner, denoting the highest score compared to its peers. Each category also produced four Market Leader awards and "One to Watch."

"In a period marked by economic and sustainability concerns, innovation and agility are the factors that separate the leaders from the laggards," said David Myron, editorial director of the magazine. "They're traits shared by every recipient of the 2010 CRM Market Awards, and we congratulate them not only for their achievements over the past year but in particular for their obvious dedication to the success of their customers."

Recipients were determined through an extensive three-month process and a proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.

The Market Leader Awards

• Enterprise Suite CRM 
  
• Midmarket Suite CRM 
  
• Small-Business Suite CRM 
  
• Sales Force Automation 
  
• Incentive Management 
  
• Marketing Solutions
• Business Intelligence
• Data Quality
• Open-Source CRM
• Consultancies

The CRM Influential Leader Awards

Eight members of the CRM community were named by the magazine as 2010 Influential Leaders:

• Marc Benioff, cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer at Salesforce.com (see CRM's November 2009 issue for our cover-to-cover special report on Benioff and Salesforce.com);
• Bill McDermott, co-chief executive officer at SAP;
• Doc Searls, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, head of the individual-empowerment initiative ProjectVRM, and one of the co-authors of the landmark Cluetrain Manifesto (see CRM's May 2010 issue for a closer look at VRM and Cluetrain at 10);
• Brian Solis, principal at FutureWorks, cofounder of the Social Media Club, and author of Engage! (see this month's Required Reading for an exclusive interview with Solis about the new book);
• Ray Wang, partner at Altimeter Group, a new and noteworthy analyst firm;
• Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a unit of Microsoft Business Solutions at Microsoft;
• Michael Wu, principal scientist of analytics at social CRM innovator Lithium Technologies; and
• Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and chief executive officer of social networking behemoth Facebook.

The CRM Hall of Fame

In addition, the magazine inducted a new member into the CRM Hall of Fame: Paul Greenberg, president and founder of consultancy The 56 Group LLC, author of industry bible CRM at the Speed of Light (the fourth edition of which came out in December 2009, with an excerpt appearing in the February 2010 issue of CRM), and prolific industry consultant, blogger, and columnist.

The CRM Rising Star Awards

The magazine also named eight Rising Stars this year — a record number:

• wunderkind analyst firm Altimeter Group;
• small-business CRM specialist BatchBlue Software;
• email marketing provider (and CoTweet acquirer) ExactTarget;
• location-based social gaming site Foursquare;
• content conductor Open Text;
• listening platform Radian6; and
• a pair of companies providing human resources software, SuccessFactors and Workday, that may help expand the parameters of CRM itself.

The CRM Elite Awards

Lastly, the magazine named four customer implementations as winners of its CRM Elite Award:

• Homebuilder Beazer Homes USA, for a sales contact center built atop Salesforce.com;
• business-product provider CDW, for a Communispace-powered environment that drove sales benefits;
• candymaker Jelly Belly, for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment; and
• diagnostic-systems provider Sysmex America, for a CDC Pivotal initiative.

The 2010 CRM Market Awards are being presented at the CRM Evolution 2010 conference at the Marriott Marquis in New York (http://www.destinationCRM.com/evolution). An expanded version of the results has been published in the August 2010 issue of CRM magazine — available in print, online and in digital NXTBook format.

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About CRM magazine

CRM magazine is the leading publication of the customer relationship management industry, covering sales, marketing, customer service, and strategy. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual CRM Evolution conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve customer-centric business initiatives, and leaders who recognize CRM as a key strategy for creating enhanced customer value in any industry. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or CRM in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.destinationCRM.com, or on Twitter at @CRM (http://twitter.com/CRM) and @destinationCRM(http://twitter.com/destinationCRM). The destinationCRM Web site (which is updated daily) and the monthly magazine are properties of CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.

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News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine.

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