But even including that, the first year cost for most of these will be less.) : Manticore Technology : a full-featured demand generation product. Pricing for a full-featured system was $597 per month—quite a bargain. Treehouse Interactive : another company I spoke with recently, and another one I’m not writing about yet because they showed me some features that won’t be released for a while (early March). It offers a pretty complete set of features, with shortfalls in some areas balanced by strengths in others. Just kidding.or Click read my March 18 review.] MORE >>

Summary: HubSpot announced a $32 million investment yesterday by Sequoia Partners, Google and Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com and Google announced their long-anticipated entry into the marketing automation industry, in the baby-step form of investments in HubSpot. And the current frogs are all small enough that a powerful newcomer could displace them, especially if it had a natural entry point such as, oh, Google AdWords or Salesforce.com’s CRM system. But if Salesforce.com likes what it sees, who knows where that will lead? intended to extend Google’s own business). MORE >>

Salesforce.com is the cloud computing darling of customer relationship management (CRM) software. They have significant control of mind share in that space, and their legacy in customer service and sales force automation software is strong. So, where does Salesforce.com stand as a marketing automation solution? Marketing Automation Software Guide decided to answer this question. Up front, Salesforce.com will garner appeal because the marketing app is bundled with the Sales Cloud 2 product. Lauren Carlson is a CRM Market Analyst with Software Advice. MORE >>

This is why it’s hard to imagine that low-priced software can deliver similar performance to mainstream products. The company’s marketing is tightly targeted at very small businesses (under 25 employees) but its marketing features are competitive with demand generation products aimed at much larger firms. Of the other two, lead scoring is primitive at best (I only saw an ability to apply segment tags, which I suppose is all you really need; the company says lead scoring is available “but we don’t advertise it because we haven’t made it easy enough within the software yet”). MORE >>

Features are stable. From an end-user perspective, none were especially exciting -- which simply confirms that QlikView already had pretty much all the features it needed. For example, there’s now an “associative search” feature that means I can enter client names in a sales rep selection box and the system will find the reps who serve those clients. Let me stress again that I’m not complaining: QlikView didn’t need a lot of new end-user features because the existing set was already terrific. qlikview business intelligence software qliktechHere’s what’s up. MORE >>