Products of the Year 2004:

The editors of SearchCRM.com sat down recently to assess the 2004 crop of products, with an eye toward helping you choose the products you should include on your "A" list for evaluation.

Given tight budgets, small staffs and ever-increasing user needs, we decided to evaluate the products based on the following criteria:

• Innovation
• Performance
• Ease of integration into environment
• Ease of use and manageability
• Functionality
• Value
• Service and support

And so we solicited nominations from vendors, scoured the market for products to nominate ourselves, and recruited a panel of judges. That panel included independent industry experts, CRM professionals, and SearchCRM.com editors. They reviewed more than 75 products in five major categories. The results are presented here.

You'll see products that are completely innovative. You'll see products that strike a chord with small and midsized businesses, or products geared toward the largest of enterprises. None are perfect for all CRM projects, but we think you'll agree that they all have valuable attributes. And when matched to the right task in the right environment, each product advances the state of the art in customer relationship management.