CRM

In his keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego last week, CEO Steve Ballmer included a preview of the company's upcoming Dynamics CRM application, code-named "Titan." The biggest change in Titan is its full multitenancy -- that is, it uses the same multitenant code ba...

SAP has ratcheted up its campaign to increase its middle market customer base with the rollout of several new applications. At the CeBIT trade fair now taking place in Hannover, Germany, the company introduced an enhanced All-In-One application that offers some 80 micro verticals and is componentize...

Do you want revolutionary improvements in IT quality and speed-to-solution with dramatic reductions in cost? Consider an organization-wide Web services delivery strategy. Today, businesses demand three key outcomes from IT: delivering faster technology solutions to a growing group of stakeholders; r...

The movement to Internet protocol-based phone systems and contact centers is in full swing. This is great news for smaller businesses, since standards-based IP networks offer far more flexibility and capabilities for much lower costs than their TDM predecessors. As a bonus, the protocol that runs th...

There's no other series of business processes that are going through more of a transformation today and impacting customer relationships more than order management. These series of processes have gone through multiple owners, first starting with IT who adopted them as a quick way to achieve ERP syst...

No call should strike more fear into the heart of an online business than a call from a customer saying, "Your site won't let me do what I want to do." Chilling words, because only a tiny percentage of online consumers will actually pick up the phone to alert businesses to a problem. By the time tha...

SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, is expanding its reach to Europe -- an essential step for any small, high growth software company more than a few years old. The company is opening its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Company cofounder Clint Oram will be the gene...

Business intelligence is a fast-growing segment area in the on-demand market. BI solutions help enterprises track performance, understand business drivers, and manage an organization's overall operations. "BI is a large, complex set of technologies, processes and methodologies that address all of th...

It's not an easy task to summarize the makeup of today's customer in a singularly defined formula. Not only do customers' individual needs vary on a case-by-case basis, but as an aggregate whole, customers' needs are maturing and have become much more complex and demanding than prior generations. Re...

Avaya is moving further into the communications collaboration space with its latest tool, Communications Enabled Business Processes. The software-and-service combo offering embeds Avaya Intelligent Communications products into a business process -- such as a production line's crisis communications a...

When Oracle announced it had agreed to buy the business intelligence vendor Hyperion for $3.3 billion, executives did not waste time explaining one of its motives. "Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle's offerings to SAP customers," Oracle President Charles Phillips stated. "...

Etelos, a provider of open source hosted Web 2.0 applications, has released a beta version of a CRM tool designed to work with Google Apps, a commercial suite of office applications Google introduced last week. The Etelos product is integrated into Google's platform. The application, called "CRMforG...

While much has been written on how vendors can get the most out of their analyst relations strategies -- both in blogs and in my book -- little has been written about how technology buyers can maximize their use of advisory firms. Jim Zimmerman, in his blog, Analyst Perspectives, presents this issue...

Six to eight weeks. That's about what it seems to take to get an on-demand solution up and running these days. This information comes from an analysis of nine on-demand vendors that we surveyed for our annual WizKids report which will be out this week. What's good about that time interval is that ...

As it does every year, Beagle Research has investigated emerging technologies and developments in the CRM space, singling out for accolades a handful of leading companies in its report -- aptly named "CRM WizKids." This year, the report highlights eight winners: Cast Iron Systems, Centive, Echopass,...