CRM

Oracle announced a compromise today on its licensing fee structure for dual-core Intel or AMD processors, which moves it closer in line with other software vendors. The database vendor had originally said it would continue to calculate licensing fees for its database and middleware products based on...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law. Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubl...

Information technology experts warn that lingering security issues are making Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, another uncontrolled tool for identity theft. RFID is an old inventory control technology that is quietly being deployed throughout business and industry to track everything from pe...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation....

When it comes to measuring their customers' satisfaction, too many companies have settled into a comfortable rut of changing their approaches to get the results they want. It's like buying a treadmill with the mile counter sped up; if we all could perform at such accelerated levels we'd all be Olym...

SAP announced today it would buy Lighthammer Software Development, which makes applications that help manufacturers monitor and manage their plants. "Lighthammer was already a good partner of SAP's, and was primarily sold as a value-add layer over solutions like SAP manufacturing, so it makes utter ...

Online marketers are in a quandary. Their customers prefer e-mail as a vehicle of communication, but spammers have poisoned that well, making it very difficult for legitimate advertisers to deliver their messages to their loyal customers. However, Think360, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas, thinks ...

Partitioning of servers in the data centers of its top customers is putting pressure on Oracle, which is making a number of moves to cope with the trend, experts say. Earlier this month, Oracle changed its licensing terms for users of Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10.0 operating system, lowering the pri...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketa...

In good times marketing and sales get all the credit for increases in sales and profits, but in bad times, IT gets the brunt of the cost-cutting pressure. What have been missing are truer measures of Return on Investment (ROI) for companies adopting customer-facing strategies. What's really needed ...

During the last downturn nearly every enterprise software vendor stayed alive for a quarter or more due to their support and maintenance revenue streams. Today, support and maintenance comprises the majority of revenue for many CRM vendors, both public and private. Existing customers are carrying t...

The bottom line is that today the analytics used in many small manufacturing companies starts and ends with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are entire manufacturing operations run off Excel, fulfilling the roles of demand planner, manufacturing scheduling, and the continual maintenance of bills...

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate. A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-bus...

European retailers, like Germany's Metro and the UK's Marks & Spencer, are aggressively moving forward with RFID projects -- with a creative flair that appears to exceed that of their American rivals, experts say. A host of cultural, political and legal factors in Europe are helping push the tre...

Prospects, customers and investors must have a lingering question in their minds with the announcement of a new CEO at Siebel: "Since George Shaheen was already on the board and capable of major influence, why haven't things changed already?" Putting a board member into the CEO slot seems like wind...