Many companies have reaped the benefits of customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the years, but more and more are turning to hosted CRM to save money, eliminate in-house maintenance, reduce deployment headaches and hasten deployment. In some cases, deployment can happen within 90 days instead of 12 months or more with a hosted solution. Costs can also be a factor. A hosted version can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars less than buying a CRM product outright. Maintenance and record-keeping is also easier; hosted systems aggregate sales figures automatically, eliminating hours of manual reporting. What's more, an on-demand system allows you to dip your toes into the water and see whether the solution is right for your company. Hosted CRM vendors include Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, and RightNow Technologies.

Learn more about hosted CRM:
- read the article at Baseline

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