Olivier-

Allow me to introduce myself and answer a couple of your questions. My name is Trip Foster, and I am the VP of Marketing at Intellibank. Below I have provided answers to the issues you pose in your coverage of Intellibank. I hope you find these responses helpful. Please contact me for a demo at your convenience.

Issue 1: "Who wants to manipulate vast amounts of data and go through many repetitive tasks on a browser?"
A: The operations within the Intellibank system are fast and can be conducted via batch process (not unlike checking and actioning multiple emails from your hotmail or yahoo accounts)

Issue 2: "I strongly doubt claims of higher ease of use. I'll believe it when I see it."
A: I would be happy to show you a demo of Intellibank. As far as ease of use, Intellibank enables users to relate any object in the system to any other appropriate object in the system -- making the system very easy to use. For example, when I am looking at a contact, I am able to see all documents, tasks, notes, meetings, calls and appointments for that contact. This same paradigm exists for any object (contact, account, task, plan, lead, opportunity, case, note, etc) in the Intellibank system.

Issue 3: "Without proper support for drag and drop…"

A: We already support partial drag and drop functionality in project/plan trees. We plan to have full drag and drop by mid year. (believe it or not its HTML)

Issue 4: "...because of relatively slow roundtrips between the client and server, let's face it, there's a limit to what makes sense to run in a browser."

A: Right... the truth be told, the benefits of centralizing and contextualizing your data far outweigh any perceptible delays in the communications between client and server. Also, with our application, we have tipped the scales with regard to how users perceive web-based applications. While Intellibank is a browser based application, it looks and behaves like desktop software, yet ships without any of the risk or expenses associates with buying software or hardware.

Issue 5: "Yet speed and reliability are key to user adoption, or else employees will route around your software. Just try to force outbound sales reps to use a Sales Force Automation solution if it's not super easy to use, and see what happens. In most cases they'll keep using Outlook, Excel, Act or whatever it is they use locally, and they won't feed your centralized system."

A: I believe this to be inaccurate both from our own experience and from the evidence that Salesforce.com provides. Slaesforce.com had over 10,000 customers with over 100, 000 users. Both Salesforce.com and Intellibank have stolen users from the desktop apps. All of whom now use a web based application to execute their objectives. We believe that any downside to a web based app is clearly outweighed by the benefits both on the user level (streamlined execution) and the manager level (roll up of critical data in real time).

Q: "Plus, lets face it, anyone who's anyone in the corporate world wants to be able to walk away with their freshest contact database at a moment's notice. The idea that your contacts belong exclusively to the company is preposterous (I've sometimes heard sales managers entertain that illusion). Without their network, many professionals aren't worth much."

Issue 6: A very valid point, which is why Intellibank offers a mobile version of the system (Pocket PC at the end of this month, RIM in June, Palm in August) as well as an offline version which you can use within Outlook, then synch up to Intellibank when you next connect to the internet.