Products of the Year 2006:

In the fall of 2006, SearchCRM.com invited companies in the CRM and related markets to nominate their products for the 2006 Products of the Year awards. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Sept. 30, 2005 and Oct. 1, 2006. For previously available products, the upgrade must have incorporated major new features that were designed to meet new or evolving needs in the marketplace. Not all companies invited to participate submitted nominations. We looked at products in eight categories: Call Center Suite, Call Center -- Hosted call center, Call center -- Workforce optimization, Call center -- Speech analytics, Marketing automation, Online self service, Salesforce automation -- Enterprise and Salesforce automation -- small, midmarket. Each category had its own set of judges, who rated the products based on a variety of criteria including innovation, performance, ease of integration into environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. We then tallied the judges' ratings separately, and aggregated them with those of the other judges to come up with a single numerical score.