Yesterday, the UK-based Sage Group said it had agreed to sell seven of its noncore products, virtually divesting itself of its North American operations. Notable divestitures in the CRM space are:

• ACT!, a contact and customer management solution for small businesses, and SalesLogix, a CRM solution aimed at the midmarket that Forrester ranked as a leader in the midmarket CRM Wave™), which were sold to to Swiftpage.
• Sage Nonprofit Solutions, a suite of solutions for fund accounting, donor and fundraising management, and grant management was sold to the Silicon-Valley based private equity firm Accel-KKR. 

We’ve all heard the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words.” These days, that’s certainly true of the balance between content and behavior that modern application developers face. There’s long been a certain amount of creative tension between designers and developers, but good developers generally appreciate the value of effective visualization.

This week I’m yielding my soapbox to a guest blogger: Rowan Curran. Rowan is a research associate on the application development and delivery role team, and I often enjoy his tweets about his own particular interests in the digital media space (follow him at @shortpierreview). His remarks below about his most recent vacation day are a good reminder that the changing nature of print and digital experiences will place increasing demands on developers to blend the real and the digital. Devs might even find themselves spending more time with designers and (gasp) artists as the real and the digital converge.

If you could see Siri as well as talk to her, what might she look like? I recently attended a panel of digital artists the MIT Media Lab who are struggling to answer questions like this. Their works ranged from algorithm-generated mosaics to more traditional digital photo-stitching. But the most surprising and interesting medium that they were working in was big data and visualization. The most poignant realization of this was Joshua Davis’s work on the visualization of IBM’s Watson.

I’m bullish on software — specifically design and engineering — and I’m starting to see that many of today’s business leaders share that opinion as they come to terms with digital disruption and the age of the customer’s impact on their competitive strategies. I hear this often as I travel to meet with both business and IT leaders, and I increasingly see it in the survey data we annually collect. What do I see in our most recent Forrsights Business Decision-Makers Survey, Q4 2012 and Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2012 results? Software, from design through development, matters:

• Business leaders have revenue growth first and foremost on their minds. On average, 70% of these business leaders place a high or critical priority on revenue growth, customer acquisition and retention, and addressing rising customer experience expectations for 2013. Our data suggests business leaders are 50% more likely to identify these as critical initiatives than they do margin improvement or reducing operating costs. Growth and customer experience improvement take business priority.

This blog post originally appeared on destinationCRM. 

Enterprise technology buyers are moving rapidly to adopt strategies and software to support digital experience (DX) initiatives. And with good reason: Forrester research shows that one of the last remaining areas for differentiation is the ability to provide compelling, engaging user experiences through digital channels. Your customers demand it, and your competition is probably already there (or well on their way).

The road to get there is replete with challenges covering the gamut of people, processes,  and technology. For technology buyers seeking to adopt DX tools and technologies, it’s a vast but immature market.

Application development and delivery pros, often on the front lines, face a proliferation of legacy and new technology to manage, engage, and measure customer experiences through digital channels—we’re talking Web sites, mobile channels, and many other digital touchpoints.

Here’s a truism: These professionals frequently encounter systems that don’t live up to their promises. They may be too old or inflexible to support rapidly changing requirements. Tech vendors add to the confusion. Some deliver all-encompassing DX suites, which have varying degrees of successful integration. Others provide pointed solutions that may deliver one part of the DX equation well, but rely on integration with third-party systems to provide a full solution.

The challenge for DX professionals is to determine how best to assess, choose, integrate, and apply the right software solutions to meet strategic DX imperatives. Easier said than done, right?

Look at Seven Main Technology Categories