Archive

A little more than a week ago, JPMorgan Chase withdrew from a seven-year, $5 billion Internet technology outsourcing agreement it inked in 2002 with IBM. It decided to pull IT inside. However, this decision represents an anomaly in the outsourcing industry.

The Oracle-PeopleSoft controversy has caused a ripple -- or perhaps a wave -- that has not yet reached the shore of software development, but it carries implications for many software firms. Although Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft is by no means a done deal, the very possibility signals a s...

First Chicago (now Bank One) initiated the trend of charging for face time with a teller in order to encourage the more cost-efficient use of ATMs. Competitors hastily followed suit. In December 2002, however, the bank dropped this controversial practice, concerned that self-service banking channels...

A week ago the U.S. District Court in San Francisco decided for Oracle in the antitrust case brought by the U.S. government, giving the software firm more hope that it can complete its hostile acquisition of PeopleSoft. "The Department of Justice may want to appeal it, but I don't think they're goin...

It's time the software industry quit ducking the tougher questions of growth by blindly claiming that every segment will either be conquered by or collapse into the domain of enterprise resource planning systems. It's getting tiresome to have so many industry insiders, financial analysts, journalist...

For companies with average revenues of $8.26 billion, the average IT budget hovers around $28.21 million, according to a Gantry Group survey. Given those numbers, small and medium-sized enterprises may wonder how they can compete in reliable and innovative information technology. But for a company w...

A fire at a telecommunications hub in Chennai, India, crippled call centers across the country yesterday, and voice and data service interruptions continued this morning. Cell phone customers of Tamil Nadu were also impacted by the fire at a Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited telecommunications facility i...

The global convenience retailer 7-Eleven Inc. is rolling out custom Hewlett-Packard technology in 5,300 U.S. locations. Both companies believe the partnership will transform convenience retailing, and some analysts agree. Aberdeen analyst Chris Selland says the plan could be revolutionary. "These gu...

In the early days of the dot-com boom, companies tracked "hits" and "eyeballs" and measured "stickiness" on their hastily created Web sites. As Web sites matured into viable business channels, however, these simple Web metrics proved to be of little value. Just as the customer data generated through...

SugarCRM, developer of Sugar Sales commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) application built on pure LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environments, has the release of Sugar Sales Professional. Incorporating Sugar Sales 1.5, a new distribution that also debuted last Thursday, Su...

A federal class action lawsuit filed Thursday accuses Salesforce.com, its CEO and its chief financial officer of withholding critical, detrimental financial information from potential investors in order to boost the share price of the company's IPO. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court i...

It is often said what separates one company's ability to develop, execute and sustain a CRM strategy is the active involvement of the CEO. But it goes deeper than that. Too many times channel management, pricing, order capture and even order management initiatives fail because the CEO pays lip servi...

Galyan's, the sporting goods retailer that features climbing walls, kayak demonstrations and archery ranges in its stores, offers an innovative CRM strategy, too. For four years, Galyan's has offered a stand-alone loyalty card that offers points for purchases, gift certificates for points and specia...

With Hurricanes Charley and Frances inflicting an estimated $40 billion worth of damage to the state of Florida in just three weeks, insurance companies have been forced onto high alert. "Natural disasters are our business," Jeanne Salvatore, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, told...

Customers today come in increasingly unique and differentiated segments. They want to be seen and approached as individuals with specific needs and to feel that offers address them personally. Satisfying these self-segmented customers requires a careful balance of science and art. While creative ide...