CRM

Open development platforms and their offspring -- mashups -- are behind the significant changes in CRM functionality that have been introduced over the last year or so. These are early days for Platform as a Service, though, and each vendor is approaching the technology on its own preferred path. Fo...

Recession. Nine letters you never want to see together in one word; at least not in that order. Sales and marketing departments across the globe are reeling from one of the worst financial crisis in recent business. The stock market is down, unemployment is climbing, and businesses are bracing fo...

Oracle continued its fast-following ways last week when it introduced additional functionality for Oracle On-Demand Release 16. The statement completed a two-part announcement begun the week before and brings to eight the number of new on-demand CRM applications from the company. The products annou...

When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn't -- as one might assume in this economy -- mean it in a bad way. In January, the company acquired Centive, its primary competitor. In Februa...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

The recession is ahead of our thinking about how to sell around it. Our first response is a tried and true strategy that is not right for all occasions. People will disagree with me, but so far we've seen a steady stream of one idea -- staying close to the customer and attending to the customer expe...

Software as a Service has become the business and software delivery model of choice among new vendors -- not to mention companies seeking to invest in IT. Surprisingly, considering the model's growing market share, few companies have sprung up to offer SaaS applications for the providers themselves....

Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down. Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Deman...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

For the last few years, Amdocs has been introducing modules, or "packs," to customers. These are packaged applications that are equipped with features that address a specific task or functional area and are designed for fast implementation. This strategy was on display last week when Amdocs rolled o...

Among the new tools and features SugarCRM introduced at its global developer conference this week are a new Web services framework and mobile customizations. The open source customer relationship management company also reiterated its support for the cloud, with the rollout of several additional c...

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowi...

Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, has been on the job since March 2008. It is no small irony that one year ago he was tasked with the assignment of strengthening the services group's financial and operating performance -- a significant undertaking, given that the services division t...

The budget cuts and spending freezes resulting from the current economic downturn have reduced the number of legitimate opportunities for sales representatives; therefore, organizations are placing a renewed emphasis on cutting costs and customer retention to combat certain economic realities. In an...

This year, companies seeking to invest further -- or for the first time -- in a CRM software system will find not only a wide array of vendors, but also a large selection of computing platforms to support the application. These can range from Software as a Service offerings typified by the standard-...