Well done and long overdue in this neglected area. Sales leadership needs to step up and demand more from their internal IT resources or seek alternatives rapidly. As you point out, SaaS applications offer many affordable options. The same gains that companies earned through automating tasks/functions like CRM, Financials and HR can provide tremondous value for the front office.

I find the cultural acceptance of change is what holds most companies and CSOs back. However, most companies also waste an inordinate amount of time, money and effort living in the chaotic world of one-dimensional Excel spread sheets and inconsistent reporting from a plethora of back-office systems. It’s no wonder that coaching and development skills and execution have also suffered from sales management proficiency. Your thoughts?

The fact that one is more batch oriented and the other is more realtime requires an entirely different caching approach, for example.

Yes, you are absolutely correct that the use of social media/analytics is accelerating. However, that is a different problem set with different computer science requirements.