Archive

South America and Central America are increasingly becoming popular destinations for information technology outsourcing -- whether it is offshore, nearshore or even "rightshore." "Central and South American countries are improving on outsourcing competitiveness," said Mark Minevich, international st...

In a move designed to quickly expand its call center capacity and productivity, Vonage today announced its sales and service subsidiary, Vonage America, has chosen Avaya's SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions. Vonage, a provider of broadband telephony in North America, hopes the move wil...

Online marketers are in a quandary. Their customers prefer e-mail as a vehicle of communication, but spammers have poisoned that well, making it very difficult for legitimate advertisers to deliver their messages to their loyal customers. However, Think360, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas, thinks ...

Partitioning of servers in the data centers of its top customers is putting pressure on Oracle, which is making a number of moves to cope with the trend, experts say. Earlier this month, Oracle changed its licensing terms for users of Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10.0 operating system, lowering the pri...

In the recent cases of customer data sales by bank employees, employers came face to face with their biggest security challenge -- trusting their employees. "It's pretty much the toughest security problem to deal with," says Rich Mogull, research vice president at Gartner, Phoenix. At the end of May...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketa...

In good times marketing and sales get all the credit for increases in sales and profits, but in bad times, IT gets the brunt of the cost-cutting pressure. What have been missing are truer measures of Return on Investment (ROI) for companies adopting customer-facing strategies. What's really needed ...

The outsourcing and offshoring of business tasks rarely fails to generate controversy, with horror stories of company veterans training their overseas replacements and major projects that were farmed out only to flame out. However, if done properly, outsourcing -- whether in another state or in anot...

A number of companies -- start-ups and established firms alike -- are eying the organic RFID tags market. Venture capital firms, like ITU Ventures, are placing seed investment bets on developers with patented prototypes. But despite the hype, the goal of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag t...

During the last downturn nearly every enterprise software vendor stayed alive for a quarter or more due to their support and maintenance revenue streams. Today, support and maintenance comprises the majority of revenue for many CRM vendors, both public and private. Existing customers are carrying t...

The bottom line is that today the analytics used in many small manufacturing companies starts and ends with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are entire manufacturing operations run off Excel, fulfilling the roles of demand planner, manufacturing scheduling, and the continual maintenance of bills...

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate. A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-bus...

European retailers, like Germany's Metro and the UK's Marks & Spencer, are aggressively moving forward with RFID projects -- with a creative flair that appears to exceed that of their American rivals, experts say. A host of cultural, political and legal factors in Europe are helping push the tre...

Prospects, customers and investors must have a lingering question in their minds with the announcement of a new CEO at Siebel: "Since George Shaheen was already on the board and capable of major influence, why haven't things changed already?" Putting a board member into the CEO slot seems like wind...

Microsoft and SAP announced today they are working to build a program -- code named "Mendocino" -- to link together Microsoft's Word office suite with SAP's enterprise software, a move that analysts say could have a profound effect on the entire market. "The possibility of a close relationship betw...