It may be difficult to register, but traditional CRM solutions have been around for 15-20 years (Siebel Systems was founded in 1993 and Salesforce.com in 1998). Since then, they have evolved from simple contact management solutions to sophisticated commercial databases, branching out to marketing, customer support, accounting and more.
In their development, these solutions have also migrated to the cloud which has facilitated their connection to popular web services (e.g. LinkedIn and Twitter) and complementary B2B applications. They have become enterprise platforms at the heart of a company’s internal and external processes.
What is bizarre is that the user interfaces of these solutions have remained stuck in the 1990s: tables, pie charts, report builders are commonplace, as are simple views on the central database whose only value is the raw information they contain.