CRM

A silent stealth war is going on between best-of-breed vendors for position in the Google AdWords column of searches on keyword searches, and a strategy on the part of larger best-of-breed vendors of completing dominating their smaller best-of-breed counterparts in AdWord spending alone. This war fo...

The buzz in enterprise software and M&A circles these days is how easy venture capital is, relatively speaking, to come by today. VentureWire, Venture Capital Journal and the many blogs from venture capitalists underscore this point. The buzz is so strong that rumors are surfacing from within ...

A truly humbling experience is to give your first Webinar as an analyst. I remember it well; my voice projected the "deer in the headlights" image that we all try to hide but the world sees anyway. Giving a good Webinar is a natural talent for some, but for the rest of us it takes work and concent...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday a bundle of application modernization services designed to help large enterprises do some IT housekeeping and set a roadmap that will lead them to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Within about three months, consultants will have sifted through the legacy app...

Hoping to appeal to smaller businesses and fend off competition from open-source rivals, Oracle plans to release a free version of its database software. The company has not made it official yet, but the expectation is that by week's end, Oracle will announce that Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle ...

The latest gold rush is on. It's the Chinese broadband market, and just like the award-winning film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" the market is a labyrinth made up of many plots and lessons, accented with plenty of action. China is emerging as the world's manufacturing center and a sourcing magn...

Bringing video to the Apple iPod opens up a wealth of ideas for attracting, selling to, serving and generating solid relationships with customers. While not primarily designed for this purpose I've been thinking about how many new opportunities Apple's latest iPod opens up for serving customers and...

The path to SOA must consider several typical approaches. SOA adoption is a gradual process. While some organizations dabble with Web services by wrapping applications as a means of exploring the world of SOA and deciding how to proceed, others engage in enterprise-wide business transformation. Othe...

With the dust still settling from Oracle's US$5.85 billion purchase of Siebel Systems, SAP is taking a run at Siebel customers, hoping to capitalize on what it calls "uncertainties" about the future of Siebel after Oracle takes control. But Siebel is going on an offensive of its own, telling custome...

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, increased availability doesn't necessarily mean increased costs. A number of companies are combining two common technologies to improve their total availability without draining their total IT budget. The secret is to teach your old servers new tricks. At the top of ...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacture...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

When Oracle agreed early in September to buy former rival Siebel Systems for US$5.85 billion, some questioned how long Siebel would continue its CRM OnDemand service. That question came to light because Oracle rival IBM plays a big role in the on-demand service. Yesterday, Siebel responded with the ...