Archive

As one of the primary functional prongs in CRM, the marketing department should use coordinated customer data to advance the sophistication, even the science, of its practices. Eastman Kodak, Rochester, N.Y., drew customer awareness, perception, satisfaction and purchase information from decades of...

Is outsourcing still dragging down salaries of key IT talent in the U.S.? Not anymore, according to a new survey by Foote Partners, an IT consultancy based in New Canaan, Conn. According to the report, such adverse effects of outsourcing -- made an issue in last year's losing presidential campaign o...

If bad data is put into a data warehouse, companies risk what Tony Fisher, president and general manager at DataFlux, described as "code, load and explode." "If the data from a source system doesn't meet the expected qualities for that data, the loading process may fail, causing the company to stop ...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been around since World War II, when the British Royal Air Force affixed tags to planes as a way to distinguish friend from foe, but it wasn't until 2003, when giant discount retailer Wal-Mart announced that it would require the tags on all shipments f...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at highe...

Oracle announced a compromise today on its licensing fee structure for dual-core Intel or AMD processors, which moves it closer in line with other software vendors. The database vendor had originally said it would continue to calculate licensing fees for its database and middleware products based on...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law. Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubl...

Service has been restored on a damaged telecommunications cable that links India and Pakistan to the West, but not before the international service outage caused widespread financial damage, most especially to the cell center industry. Service on the cable was restored on Friday. The cable was damag...

Information technology experts warn that lingering security issues are making Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, another uncontrolled tool for identity theft. RFID is an old inventory control technology that is quietly being deployed throughout business and industry to track everything from pe...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation....

Even when companies outsource some functions, they often keep control over far more than their core competencies. Unless outsourcing will deliver a cost savings with equal or better service quality, they keep it in-house. "They say, 'We want a service level, a service assurance at a price, and if yo...

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on...

Damage to the undersea telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3) Monday initially disrupted most of Pakistan's international telephone and Internet connections, but the outage spread to India, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Djibouti as repairs were started yesterday. Call centers in India using...

When it comes to measuring their customers' satisfaction, too many companies have settled into a comfortable rut of changing their approaches to get the results they want. It's like buying a treadmill with the mile counter sped up; if we all could perform at such accelerated levels we'd all be Olym...

SAP announced today it would buy Lighthammer Software Development, which makes applications that help manufacturers monitor and manage their plants. "Lighthammer was already a good partner of SAP's, and was primarily sold as a value-add layer over solutions like SAP manufacturing, so it makes utter ...