CRM

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures gam...

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems. Features include ConnectOut, an on-demand outbound messaging application program interface; ConnectOracle, which integrate...

Perhaps a savvy political operative tasked with designing the best go-to-market campaign for service-oriented architecture would proclaim: "It's the applications, stupid!" Focusing on the applications -- and not the means to achieving them -- has served computing well over the decades. I recall tryi...

When the Internet burst upon the scene in the early 1990s, the concept of software as a service seemed an idea whose time had come. It got hyped along with everything else about the Internet and reached a massive peak of inflated expectations in early 2000, as venture capitalists funded dozens of ne...

Siebel reportedly settled a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of its software engineers for US$27.5 million. The software maker was accused of violating overtime laws between 2000 and 2005. Approximately 800 employees who worked for Siebel will be receiving on average of $27,000 each, assuming th...

There is little dispute that Software as a Service model rapidly becoming a dominant delivery model. By 2009, more than 50 percent of new implementations of sales force automation applications will be SaaS deployments, according to a new Gartner research note. Not surprisingly, the popularity of th...

A recent national survey found that an overwhelming 83 percent of consumers would purchase more online if retailers provided more interactive and interesting sites. Consumers surveyed expressed interest in a wide variety of features that would improve their shopping experience, but what does creatin...

Avaya on Thursday made two related announcements: the acquisition of enterprise mobility software maker Traverse Networks; and a new product strategy centered around unified communications. Avaya's unified communications solutions give corporate users easy access to all of their communications appli...

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear d...

Siebel led a list of top CRM applications ranked according to their size and expertise in eight vertical markets in a recent IDC report. Not surprisingly, Oracle's other CRM solutions -- thanks to multiple acquisitions over the last several years -- also dominate a majority of the categories. Howeve...

Consumer loyalty has become such a ubiquitous goal for marketers that its definition is murky, at best. Ten years ago, a loyal customer participated with a chosen brand more frequently than the average shopper. For marketers, the term has evolved to encompass frequency, recency of interaction and mo...

SAS has upgraded its marketing automation and marketing optimization applications with new functionality. While not a point release, the upgrades are worth noting because of their inclusion -- for the first time -- of digital marketing. First though, to give the marketing automation and optimizatio...

SalesGene, a startup that worked a niche category of sales force automation called "marketing sales effectiveness," has renamed itself and repositioned its product in order to better serve its potential buyers. The firm is now called "Landslide Technologies," echoing the name of the firm's portal-li...

eGain Communications has released the latest iteration of its self-service application, eGain Service 7.6. New features include guidance on complex customer interactions and tweaks to security, as well as additional process improvement. Such incremental gains in functionality -- across the self-serv...

So your small business is experiencing better-than-expected growth, and you're ready to take the next step and expand globally? Think about when you go shopping -- more often than not, you may notice phrases like "Made in Mexico," "Made in Sri Lanka" or "Made in Italy." Perhaps they're on your cloth...