If the prospect of deploying a customer-relationship management (CRM) system gives you pause, an "on-demand" CRM application may be a smart alternative. The latest generation of these Web-based, hosted services brings expanded customization capabilities, new business-enhancing features, and improved interfaces to the table. For an all-inclusive monthly fee, on-demand CRM lets you avoid undertaking heavy-duty software-development efforts, maintaining expensive in-house data centers, and worrying about rolling out up-grades.

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Here we evaluate the latest offerings from NetSuite, salesforce.com, and Salesnet. Watch our upcoming issues for a review of another major player in the space, Siebel's CRM OnDemand, which the company was busy integrating with the service it gained when it acquired Upshot.