Some quick updates on some open-source vendors and companies we have recently covered in the pages — both paper and Web — of CRM:

• Open-source software company xTuple recently announced that, despite the economic recession, the company realized record revenue growth in 2008. Sales were up 250 percent year-over-year compared with 2007, according to information provided by xTuple. A leader in last year’s Open-Source CRM category for CRM‘s Market Awards issue, the company looks to continue growing with its latest product release loaded with more CRM features and other improvements.

• Technical support provider Geeks on the Way (GOTW) was recently named the winner of the CRM Implementation & User Adoption Program category in the third annual 2009 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Profiled in our December issue of CRM, the company utilized open-source pioneer SugarCRM to keep pace and scale effectively to its ever-growing business. Stay tuned to find out if GOTW can continue its ambitious growth plans with the help of SugarCRM.

Wendy Lea

Meet Wendy Lea, the new CEO of Web 2.0 customer service site, Get Satisfaction. Lea brings a breadth of knowledge to Get Satisfaction — a former VP of marketing for Siebel and then an angel investor, Lea seems to understand what makes enterprises tick. She will be taking over the chief operating role for Thor Muller, one of the founders of the company. Muller will continue on as chief technology officer for Get Sat.

I had the opportunity to pick Lea’s brain a bit this week. She was a great sport considering she is only two weeks into the new gig. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

CRM: What’s the transition been like so far?

Lea: Fun. It’s all good. You know the success we have had on the consumer side. Mid-last year, company sign-ups have really punched there. We’ve got an average of 75 [companies] coming in a day. We have a total of 12,000 in the system. Some are long tail. Some are big, big brands. It’s a fun time for us even with all the craziness around the company. The value proposition is strong because it is about reducing costs and getting closer to the customer.

CRM: So what’s on tap next for Get Satisfaction?

Lea: The trick is finding the right feature set and price points so we can maintain a good set of self-service customers and address what I would call the high-end professional customers, which, for them, is more about integration with their own sites and with CRM systems and with the community systems that they have already purchased. They want us on the front end to create communities and push feedback through and push through their customer service solution sets.

We aren’t a whole product. There is no one whole product. Because of the economic aspect and the consumer sensitivity that we create for companies, it seems — keep in mind, I’m only on week two — that the bigger brands, in particular, that allow themselves to take part are keen to re-engage. They are not just saying “come to our site” but are listening. And for some, we are their sole customer service solution. Read on… »

Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff delivered the good news to eager investors and financial analysts yesterday in his quarterly earnings call after the market closed. It was like a spring rain in a desert. For the year just ended—its 10th—Salesforce.com generated just over $1 billion in revenue, smashing its previous records, and adding 3,600 net new customers.

Ten years ago Benioff, Parker Harris, and a small group of determined San Francisco technology mavens and executives founded the company on the premise that the world ought to move to on-demand computing. While the idea was intuitively obvious to true believers, there was a great deal of doubt in the rest of the world. Skeptics complained that no one would trust their data to the emerging Internet or that an application that ran in a browser could be very powerful. Times change.

I remember very clearly the first time two people from Salesforce.com—Clarence So and former CEO John Dillon—briefed me, in February 2000. I had just started a job the prior month as a senior analyst at the old Aberdeen Group and for whatever reason I had decided to cover the emerging market of CRM and hosted delivery models.

My previous jobs had mostly been in software sales—and the first time I saw Salesforce.com’s product I not only thought, “This makes perfect sense,” but also, “Why wasn’t this available when I was selling?” It was such a clear idea, the kind of thing that I would later call a disruptive innovation.

Today Salesforce.com is the CRM market leader—if not in absolute terms, then certainly in momentum and mojo. They took on Siebel Systems in what looked like a preposterous and Quixotic adventure—and ended up eating Siebel’s lunch. Whoa!

The company has achieved a great deal in the last 10 years, making on-demand or software-as-a-service or whatever they decide to call it this week an increasingly conservative choice for new solutions, and not just for CRM. With ever-growing regularity, HR and back-office applications are now being sourced as on-demand offerings.

Nobody starts a company that builds conventional applications anymore. The economics simply don’t work. And it is so obvious that a new generation of innovators is not only building apps the on-demand way but building new business processes as well. Take Salesforce.com alumnus Tien Tzuo, who founded Zuora last year with a small cadre of friends. The vision? To deliver an on-demand billing-and-payment system for on-demand companies. It turns out that these companies have requirements not easily met by conventional billing systems. So the innovation process has started anew.

The business model took a lot of getting used to in a world where revenue charts for technology companies typically looked like blueprints for ski resorts. In a world where technology costs were high and products’ built-in obsolescence required replacement by subsequent larger investments, it was a challenge for a vendor to convince financial analysts that this way was better. Customers would respond to low total cost of ownership with loyalty. In the end the company’s momentum and happy customer base gave the financial whiz kids the encouragement to back the company’s IPO.

Steve Cakebread came on board as chief financial officer to help Salesforce.com in its successful pre-IPO courtship of the movers and shakers on Wall Street—and just a few weeks ago Cakebread left the company, perhaps to start the long process over again, this time as CFO of Xactly, an incentive management company. In yesterday’s call, Benioff graciously acknowledged Cakebread’s contributions.

There will be plenty of time later to discuss the company’s latest adventures in Cloud Computing, and to critique this or that. Today, we can savor the moment when on-demand computing hit the billion-dollar mark. Happy 10th birthday, Salesforce.com.

Denis Pombriant is the founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. His own blog can be found here, and he can be reached at denis@beagleresearch.com, or on Twitter (@denispombriant).

Salesforce.com just posted its Q4 and FY08 results, and it’s official: Marc Benioff no longer has to talk about his company’s run rate. Its annual revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2009 totaled $1.077 billion. This makes Salesforce.com the first pure SaaS business to to to surpass the billion-dollar mark. Congratulations to everybody involved.

Rather than restate their press release, I’ll link it instead. We’ll provide more complete coverage once we’ve digested it all.

My fear is that I’m about to write a rambling, semi-coherent post full of paranoid fantasies about privacy violations and evil corporations. But isn’t that what blogs are for?

Today’s bit is inspired by a New York Times article about the Deep Web, a term referring to the wealth of information stored in databases that are hidden from regular search engines. New technologies are being developed that can reach into these dark corners and mine useful and relevant data including “financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.”

I’m all for better searching, greater relevance, and more accurate predictions of what I am really looking for when I type in a search. But aren’t some of these things hidden from public view for a reason?

I’m aware that the intent of these efforts is not to expose private or classified information to unauthorized scrutiny. Still, one of my first thoughts on the topic was “keep your nose out of my business.” I’ve gotten past that, for the most part; these new engines aren’t built to snoop passwords and steal secrets, and the owner has to take reasonable steps to protect what is owned.

No, by this point I’m more concerned with practicality, relevance, and value. It’s already hard enough to find information, despite Web tech making information freely available to anybody who can use a browser—there’s a lot of clutter and misdirection that can get in the way. Opening up our options to include what the Times article calls an infinitely large haystack has the potential to create an infinite mess.

I have the feeling that digging through hidden databases is the easy part of the problem. The real trick is going to be making sense of what’s out there. Searches will trigger searches of their own, adding another layer of complexity to what goes on in the background. In addition to finding what is requested, machines will have to guess (through statistical analysis) what an inquiry is really after, get that information, and prepare to present it. Refining a search might mean throwing out all that second-level data and digging for another set, and so on until the user is done. And it all has to look simple and seamless.

Guessing right feels great, and it’s a magical experience when a person (or a machine) seems to intuit our inner thoughts based on minimal information. I still get an “oh wow” moment when I look something up on the Web and find exactly what I’m looking despite seemingly inadequate search terms. If I could send a question into the ether and get a direct answer, along with some truly relevant next steps, every time, it would be a whole new Web for me.

The possibilities are tremendous. The challenges are as well.  The company that gets it right and makes it truly useful first will have a license to print money. My ramble is over. Let the discussions begin.