A gauge of how little customer relationship management systems seem to have changed can be seen by visiting http://insight.ly. It’s a Gmail plug-in that manages customer relationships and bears a striking resemblance to early Windows-based contact managers. But the resemblance is superficial. Browser-based access to CRM with back-ends hosted in the cloud is game-changing indeed. According to David Cosgrave, business unit manager of Acctech CRM, the days of desktop-based CRM solutions are numbered.

“We deal primarily in web-based CRM software and that is the future,” he says. “The days of downloadable products are over. It’s so much easier to make it browser-based.”