Archive

A drive to improve citizen services is part of a long-term push by the U.S. government to be more responsive to taxpayer needs and to diminish its unresponsive, bureaucratic image. Most recently, the U.S. Census Bureau revealed it has turned to a hosted-CRM solution from RightNow Technologies to inc...

Salesforce.com is riding a bumpy road toward its eventual IPO. Last week, the SEC put a timeout on the company's public debut, which had been slated for this week. Apparently, CEO Marc Benioff violated the requisite IPO "quiet period" when he chatted about competition to a reporter writing a New Yor...

It's an age-old slogan for companies: "We value your business." Thanks to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, many enterprises now can place a highly specific value on the worth of each customer's business. Like it or not, CRM systems allow companies to identify customer segments, or "ti...

Just a month after announcing it would introduce 23 vertical industry solutions, Siebel Systems shipped the first two this week. Overall, the company's vertical CRM product line is designed to improve functionality, business processes, integration and analytics while reducing corporate customers' to...

CRM software revenues are expected to reach $30 billion in the next several years, according to research firm Cahners In-Stat. Even so, CRM implementation projects are often cited for high failure rates. To avoid losing customers, these projects need to succeed in more dimensions than just company m...

The dynamic duo of IBM and PeopleSoft has launched an initiative that the two companies say will expand their existing alliance, allowing them to focus more sharply on small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) worldwide. The alliance calls for joint hardware and software development of vertical applicati...

SAP's Sapphire user conference in New Orleans kicked off last week with a keynote by SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann, who called for more efforts to streamline the company's applications and bolster Web services adoption. Those twin themes were echoed frequently throughout the week in conferen...

Like the Trojan War, the battle between Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft, Inc. has languished for a while but soon may reach epic proportions. In this tale, however, the weapons are hostile takeover offers and the soldiers are chief financial officers, technical experts and attorneys. It's not clear yet ...

Customer-service managers are always looking for ways to boost agent productivity by shaving seconds off calls and increasing upsell rates. Indeed, if there were a customer-service crystal ball that could search through all customer interactions and spot future trends, visualizing patterns and notin...

Shoshana Zuboff is a genius, but don't just take my word for it. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote a book called The Support Economy with her husband and collaborator, James Maxmin. What makes Zuboff a genius is that although I think the book is about CRM, there is onl...

About 7,500 C-level and senior executives from midsize to large companies are gathering this week to attend SAP's annual Sapphire conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Attendees -- some of whom are coming from as far away as Europe and Asia -- will have the opportunity to network with peers, learn a...

Rapid growth of information technology among small and medium businesses (SMBs) with between 100 and 1,000 employees has not been lost on some major integration players, including Microsoft and IBM. With this week's launch of IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express, Big Blue is attempting ...

Onyx, a mid-market provider of CRM software, has unveiled upgrades to its Contact Center product that are designed to help it branch deeper into the contact-center and vertical markets. The improvements include call-center scripting and enhanced Web self-service capabilities. As a result of Onyx' mo...

There's no doubt that Siebel will continue to have a great influence on the company he founded, but there are so many layers to this decision that it is inevitable the significance of Siebel's move will be debated for some time. Let's look at some of those layers.

The state of Ohio is suing software maker PeopleSoft, seeking up to $510 million in damages and costs because of what it calls a faulty installation of the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications at Cleveland State University.