Products of the Year 2008:

In the fall of 2008, SearchCRM.com invited companies in the CRM, call center and related markets to nominate their products for the 2008 Products of the Year awards. We also solicited nominations through the SearchCRM.com website and through email newsletters to our readers. To be eligible for consideration, a product had to have been introduced or significantly upgraded between Sept. 30, 2007 and Oct. 1, 2008. 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 we invited to participate ultimately submitted nominations. We looked at products in eight categories: CRM suite - Enterprise, CRM suite - SMB, Call center suite, Workforce optimization, Marketing automation and Sales force automation. 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.