In the race to differentiate IP communications services, a natural area  for service providers in the business market to look is the CRM space. Integration with customer relationship management systems is common in large enterprises and even medium companies have embraced the concept.

Now, small business customers utilizing a hosted solution can take advantage of one of the cream of the crop hosted CRM packages -- SalesForce.com. You see, Packet8 service will now seamlessly integrate with Mark Benioff's creation.

What does this mean for the market? Simple... This news shows that more powerful services are coming to smaller and smaller business customers.

The first CTI links which allowed similar functionality required an IBM mainframe and a Rockwell ACD. We are talking a million dollar investment or so in the late 1980s.

By the way, the ACD division of Rockwell was sold years later to Concerto which became Aspect which recently received a Microsoft investment.

Later, in the nineties as CTI became more popular, Novell and Microsoft provided links to their operating systems which PBX and ACD manufacturers used to provide similar functions. Entry-level cost? Maybe $20-$30k.

Now you can get similar functionality for less than $1,000/year. It is amazing how this technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper over time and moreover it shows that from a technology perspective, even the smallest companies in the world can now compete effectively with the largest.