CRM

Oracle OpenWorld wasn't a day old before Twitter-like blog posts began peppering the Internet. Mike Gotta from the Burton Group posted notes encapsulating his essential gleanings from Charles Phillip's keynote. Paul Greenberg was equally terse in his posts, which numbered at least five by the middle...

"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surpr...

Peak oil: When planet Earth reaches the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. Some say it has already happened, some believe it will within the next 50 years, and some deny the possibility all together. By any measure, though, it is ...

There is a near-universal desire among firms to link all aspects of their supply chain -- including the customer front end -- on one platform. However, there are relatively few applications on the market today that address that demand. ModusLink hopes to fill that void with its newly launched e-busi...

Gartner's CRM conference is always a big event for the industry. The 2008 gathering, which just wrapped, was no different, with attendees leaving the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Oxon Hill, Md., in a thoughtful mood over the direction CRM is heading. Not surprisingly, there was a...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social netw...

When one company is ousted from the S&P 500 index, another one is added to keep the number at 500. The most recent losers in this game of musical chairs are, for obvious reasons, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Effective Sept. 12, these mortgage giants will be replaced by Fastenal and Salesforce.com...

In what could best be termed a photo finish, Greenplum and Aster Data Systems have both announced that they have integrated MapReduce into their massively parallel processing database engines. MapReduce, pioneered by Google for analyzing the Web, now becomes available to enterprises and service prov...

Four months out of the gate, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has been updated with Web 2.0 functionality to support Internet marketing campaigns, as well as other activities. The new features allow users to create and manage online and search engine campaigns; research and bid on keywords using search...

Many contact centers continue to operate at suboptimal levels. Case in point: One financial services company has managed to turn "press zero to talk to a human" into not just a selling point but a major advertising campaign. While some great leaps in efficiency and quality have been made over the pa...

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about t...

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. In addition to the publication of new ana...

"Smart" shopping carts have been around for a while, but until recently, they haven't managed to gain much traction. Now, some momentum is building, according to proponents of the computer-rigged market baskets that -- with a swipe of a card -- can flash an alert that a customer's favorite brand of ...

Two-year-old Demandbase has planted its own stake in the rapidly emerging next-gen lead generation and lead conversion space with the introduction this week of Demandbase. A Software as a Service platform, Demandbase Central consists of sales and marketing applications as well as a search, scoring a...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a $31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively li...