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An affiliate of a global acquisitions firm, Platinum Equity, LLC, has agreed to purchase a controlling interest in CompuCom Systems. Safeguard Scientifics, which has a 58 percent voting interest in CompuCom, has agreed to vote for the acquisition. The Platinum Equity affiliate will acquire CompuCom ...

In a David-swallows-Goliath merger on a mid-market scale, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Conexio, which has 10 employees, has acquired Dallas, Texas-based Enterprise Computer Solutions (ECS), which has 25 employees. The merger creates the largest value-added reseller of FrontRange Solutions' products in the...

In a terse, one-sentence press release, Siebel Systems today confirmed it has closed 175 new transactions for its hosted product, CRM OnDemand, since the start of Q2 2004 and that the number includes 62 new OnDemand customers. Siebel and IBM first announced the hosted CRM cooperative product, which ...

For the fourth time, Pleasanton, California-based PeopleSoft has responded to Oracle's latest takeover offer of $21 per share with a resounding "no." Previously, the company's board had rejected three other escalating offers of $16, $19.50 and $26 per share. PeopleSoft spokesperson Steve Swasey told...

Your broadband connection is down, and you can't get online to download the patches to fix it. Frustrated, you turn to the telephone. Once you find someone who can help, you have to relate the litany about your computer and all of the software you are running. Then, maybe, if you are lucky, you can ...

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...

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...

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...

SPSS has introduced a new product, PredictiveCallCenter, that it says can transform inbound call hubs from cost centers to profit centers. The application integrates with call-center CRM and call management systems to determine on-the-fly the best way to market to inbound callers, noting whether the...

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...

Like a bevy of CRM software providers before it, Kana this week pushed out the first phase of its hosted onDemand initiative for its iCARE suite of Service Resolution Management (SRM) solutions. The company's onDemand project initially supports Kana's Response Live application, is available as eithe...

At its Sapphire '04 international customer conference in New Orleans today, SAP rolled out several new packaged offerings for CRM, ERP and vertical industry applications. The software is designed to help mid-market companies address specific business processes, accelerate implementation and achieve ...

CRM is not just for the private sector, and -- in a rather dramatic illustration of that fact -- Siebel Systems has announced that its business applications will help maximize the readiness of the new Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. Use of commercial-off-the-shelf software, ...

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...

Hosted CRM vendor RightNow Technologies announced Monday that it has filed for an initial public offering to sell $60 million of its common stock with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The number of shares the company plans to offer and the price range for the offering are still to be det...

Whether it is CDs or refrigerators, mega-retailer Best Buy believes it has the best deals -- and it wants customers to keep buying by putting them at the center of what it does. The nearly US$25 billion company announced that it just finished almost a yearlong test of its customer-centricity program...

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...