I heard a rumour that Google had released a CRM product, so I decided to scour the Net to find out what it could do. It looks fairly capable, but I’m not too sure about the interface. As this is a beta application, I’m sure that improvements are going to be made, but at the moment, it seems to suffer from an identity crisis.

From the example you can see that Google have included it into their homepage system. Now, I can’t imagine that this would be a wise choice as information is designed to be presented as a “homepage” and it doesn’t really work for CRM.

Maybe more investigation is needed to find out exactly what Google has planned (if they’re even sharing this kind of information). Software as a Service vendors may have something to worry about if Google seriously decide to step into this ring.

Overnight Vivid Software released beta 1 of it’s new vCRM 2005 software. You may remember my interview with Clarke Scott, the man behind Vivid Software. He’s been hard at work for quite a while to produce this first beta. So, congratulations Clarke, I’m currently downloading the beta now to take a look.