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In the last few years, I can’t help but notice the increase in direct contact between developers and clients. This is often necessary for both the client to fully understand the work that is being done, as well as for the developer to hear directly from the client what they expect.

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The science and art of infographics is intriguing. An example of an infographic was Monday’s post on Soda vs. Pop statistics. The purpose of infographics is to give people a quick, visual shortcut to understanding the relationship and meaning of many numbers and/or statistics. The New York Times online had a disturbing, but effective interactive infographic yesterday showing the incredible change in one year of the financial sector’s total stock market value and the the carnage of major players involved in that change.

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Sundog recently released a convenient application to customize the lead assignment behavior within salesforce.com’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) application.  The new app, Territory Lead Routing 1.0, is available for no charge on the AppExchange for organizations using PRM.

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No matter whose IT predictions you look at for 2008, software as a service (SaaS) looms big. For those not familiar with this term, SaaS is software that customers do not pay to own. Rather, it is an on-demand system usually hosted through a third party and customers access the software’s applications via the Internet.

The SaaS model has seen tremendous growth in the last few years primarily because it is easier and costs less to implement than large enterprise systems that reside on a company’s own servers. Some fast-growing SaaS vendors include companies such as Salesforce.com, RightNow, and NetSuite, but there are many companies charging hard to catch-up in this sector including software giants Microsoft and Oracle.

There are a number of stories that have surfaced in the last few months indicating SaaS has reached a crucial tipping point, and 2008 may be the year that it begins its breakout to become the norm for most companies:

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Paula Stout recently offered an interesting analogy in a Business Week article that illustrates the divide that often exists between sales and marketing at many companies. She said sales often uses the aspirin approach: sell to the pain points a customer might have. On the other hand, marketing often uses the vitamin approach: they assume clients want to grow so they offer longer-term solutions that will fortify future performance. It’s an illustrative comparison. The problem, of course, is that unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there is a good chance that your customers or prospective customers will be confused about your brand.

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