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For some companies, the decision to move to the cloud is a no-brainer -- especially if they limit their planning to pure number crunching. Without a doubt, the savings for such a leap, both explicit and implicit, can be huge. Still, though, there are technical issues to consider, not the least of wh...

One of the common myths surrounding HIPAA is that it is not a privacy law at all, and that it weakened rather than strengthened individuals' rights to health information privacy. That's not the case at all, according to Deven McGraw, recently appointed director of the Center for Democracy & Tech...

Responding to heightened concerns about the privacy of individuals' medical and healthcare information, the federal government in 1996 introduced HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It empowered the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and manage the methods...

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum. It's hard to believe th...

Some 9.1 percent of families in the U.S. do not have a deposit account of any type, according to a recent household survey from the Federal Reserve. This market segment lives check to check and typically avoids opening bank accounts because of a lack of funds combined with a deep distrust of banks.

Although in its infancy, the market for on-demand application systems, including Software as a Service, is taking root and growing rapidly in East Asia, as was seen in Part 1 of this series. Springboard Research sees SaaS revenues in the region growing 80 percent annually between 2006 and 2010 from ...

What should companies do -- and what should they refrain from doing -- when reacting to blog postings about their products or services? Robert Cox, president of the New York-based Media Bloggers Association and a consultant to consumer packaged goods companies, has very specific ideas on the subject...

Unica has introduced a new version of its marketing resource management platform, Affinium Plan 7.3. Though it is a point release, some of Version 7.3's new functionality is new to the industry as well. The new Marketing Objects feature allows marketers to digitally store and reuse marketing informa...

Digital dashboards for the corporate world usually employ the typical "green light, yellow light, red light" motif, giving you an at-a-glance view of the company's bottom line (except, of course, for the color-blind -- like myself). However, the Holy Grail for metric gazers is not where the busines...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the...

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...

In discussing weight or golf scores it's easier to exaggerate the positive than to tell the truth. The same holds true when it comes to SAP ERP integrations. Integrating to any ERP system is hard work, but SAP integration around meaningful business processes can be much more challenging than integ...

StayinFront, a global provider of enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) applications, decision support tools and e-business systems, today announced that Endo Pharmaceuticals, a fully integrated pharmaceutical company with market leadership in pain management, will expand use of the...

As more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet not just for information, but as a way to run their daily errands, the need for more sophisticated customer service grows unabated. The old one-two punch of call-center representatives and an online Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page does not ...

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...

Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow Technologies is a major player in the on-demand CRM space. In an interview with CRM Buyer, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte explained that unlike hosted CRM leader salesforce.com, which has its roots in sales force automation, RightNow focuses primarily on customer service...