CRM

Small businesses have typically shied away from complex software deployments. CRM, for instance, still has a low penetration rate in this end of the market despite the number of offerings from such firms as Microsoft, Salesforce.com, FrontRange, Sage and others. These firms' evangelization efforts h...

2007 enterprise software budgets are showing a 10 percent year-over-year increase, according to a recent Forrester Research survey, with software-related spending expected to account for 30 percent of the total. Companies are looking to spend that money on improving integration between applications,...

For years, vendors have argued the merits of click-to-call versus click-to-chat, but most analysts now agree that both solutions are an effective means of reaching out to Web site visitors to engage them in conversation. There is little doubt that nearly any company with a Web presence can see posit...

Internet search leader Google unveiled its latest set of online business tools Thursday, aiming to snare a bigger piece of the enterprise market dominated by Microsoft. Google already has at least one player onboard: IP telephony firm Avaya. Avaya, a top provider of Internet phone switchboards for b...

You don't have a lot of technology resources inside your company. In fact, just getting your office printer to work all the time seems like a monumental challenge. Investing in technology, whether it's new software or hardware, means dealing with a lot of stuff that just may not work like you expect...

I got a lot of mail on the piece I wrote last week about retail data collection. The mail ran two to one in support, but it was still interesting to gauge the reactions of those who think the notion of collecting data like ZIP codes, drivers license numbers and the like is kosher. Let me say again ...

The newly released American Customer Satisfaction Index provides fresh data illustrating consumers' growing love affair with e-commerce. The e-commerce industry registered a score of 80 on ACSI's 100-point scale -- less than a percentage point away from its all-time high score of 80.8 in 2003, accor...

Microsoft is offering new business intelligence features for its Dynamics CRM product. It can be downloaded for free from CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project-hosting Web site, and the Microsoft CRM Sandbox, a GotDotNet project created for Microsoft CRM users. Called "Microsoft Dynamics CRM Ana...

Verint Systems has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Witness Systems for $27.50 per share in an all-cash deal that will total roughly $1 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, pending approval by regulators and Witness Systems stockholders. The combined pro...

About 51 percent of organizations contacted for a recent study by Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm are using at least one on-demand application. This finding was not surprising to Rebecca Wettemann, Nucleus Research's vice president, because even though the technology has been around for only a s...

More than one third of the Web analytics market will be upgrading, replacing or deploying systems in the next 12 months which will create new opportunities for application vendors, according to a report released Tuesday by Jupiter Research. A survey of executives found that 12 percent of respondents...

Salesforce.com issued a press release last week that by now looks rather ho-hum by its standards. The company announced that Deloitte & Touche had signed on as a systems integration partner and that got me thinking about how many things have changed, and how many have not. It wasn't that long ag...

Organizations of all types are increasingly turning to business intelligence applications -- a combination of data mining, statistical and numerical analysis and data visualization -- to better manage and make sense of the ever-growing amounts of data they are collecting. Continuing the mantra of Pa...

Achieving real-time visibility into an organization's financial status means making key information not only current but transparent for the executives who need it to make decisions. Business intelligence and enterprise resource planning systems help accomplish that, but an increasing number of comp...

Inventory has different values depending on time. The goal of a supply chain is to deliver the right product at the right place at the right time and the right cost. Miss any of those elements and the value of the inventory can be severely damaged. Let me demonstrate with a real example. My family m...