Last year, the two hot customer relationship management trends to watch— and adopt — were social CRM and mobile CRM. To find out whether they will continue to dominate the CRM landscape and what other trends organizations should pay attention to, CIO.com talked to leading CRM solution vendors and analysts. In the process, we came up with eight CRM trends to watch—and implement— in 2012.

It is predicted that 2012 will be the year when customer relationship management (CRM) software becomes truly customer centric and based on an open, Cloud orientated model, SugarCRM’s country manager has claimed.

SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, which makes customer relationship management (CRM) software for IBM Lotus Notes users, in a bid to attract more enterprise customers and compete better against bigger rivals like Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

A new connector for open-source collaboration platform Open-Xchange provides integration with SugarCRM, allowing for contact and calendar information to be synchronized between the two products, Open-Xchange said on Monday.

IBM's LotusLive on-demand collaboration suite is getting a boost via integration with SugarCRM and Ariba's Discovery Service supplier database, the companies announced Thursday.

Software developer Christopher Shockey saw the first signs of trouble in late 2008. A sales rep who had always represented Web application development provider Coghead was now calling on behalf of Coghead's much larger rival Salesforce.com.

With the world economy in shambles many businesses are already battening down the hatches expecting rough seas ahead. IT budgets will shrink along with all other budgets, and maybe even more than other budgets. After all, companies still need to advertise and pay their workforce, but they may be able to do without new servers or software for a while. And that is where open source software vendors can help keep the ship sailing.