CRM

Siebel Branch Teller, a new retail bank solution that invigorates cross sales and customer care at branches, finally brings CRM to the channel that originates most financial services relationships with consumers. The product, which uses IBM middleware specifically designed for the retail banking ver...

Oracle today announced a quarterly schedule of security bulletins and patch releases for 2005 that is "a bit of a tradeoff," according to one analyst. "I fully understand why Oracle would want to use a timed release-cycle, but I'm not sure what the reason is for their decision to move away from the ...

The irony is too strong to ignore. Gartner, Forrester, IDC and other analyst firms are all forecasting that outsourcing will continue growing rapidly. Yet not one is forecasting when industry analysis itself will move offshore. With so many conceptual thinkers in these companies, someone has got to...

The consumer backlash against unsolicited telemarketing and e-mails coupled with ever-increasing competition for customer attention have forced companies to take a new look at their inbound call centers. Long considered a profit drain and necessary evil, inbound call centers are now seen as a critic...

Long known as a technology and hardware provider, Unisys has pushed to diversify, joining the ranks of large systems integrators just when many companies are drawn to the simple, low-risk offerings of hosted solutions providers. Unisys, however, sees that trend as temporary, and its CRM leaders feel...

Making inroads into the next major market for software isn't going to happen from enterprise vendors trying to wedge expensive, large application footprints into a product strategy that appeals to medium-sized companies. Despite Oracle, Siebel and others proclaiming they can make this strategy work...

Intermec Technologies has cleared the path for retail companies to test second-generation radio-frequency identification (RFID) products and move toward wide-scale adoption. The company will suspend for 60 days its intellectual property licenses to stimulate RFID manufacturers to create and test sys...

Salesforce.com today announced the expansion of its on-demand service with Winter '05. The product line includes Salesforce.com Winter '05, Supportforce.com Winter '05, sforce 5.0 and the new on-demand customization toolkit, Customforce.com. Winter '05 will provide the applications, customization to...

There's a major disconnect between the expectations and results companies are getting when they realign processes aimed at serving their customers, as I've discovered in conversations with several manufacturers. There are several reasons why these unrealistic expectations take hold. First, nearly ev...

SAP and Hewlett-Packard announced today they will jointly offer a business management tool that they say brings enterprise-level best practices to small and medium-size businesses. The hosted software will be priced on a per-user basis, starting at $325 per month. SAP's software will sit on top of H...

In some ways the buzz about business intelligence analytics, an increasingly common add-on to a smart and established CRM system, resembles the buzz five years or so ago about CRM. Maybe the two don't match up just so, but organizations do have to exercise caution in choosing BI analytics solutions,...

In the last few years, enterprises have added several tools to their IT data integration toolbox. But most of these companies have not achieved a simple goal: creating reliable, unified views of their customers. Recently companies have turned to three common technologies to create solutions for cust...

The Food and Drug Administration recently green-lighted a product called VeriChip, a coded radio chip that, when picked up by a radio-frequency reader in an ambulance or hospital emergency room, yields a code that unlocks a patient's medical stats from a central database. Unsurprisingly, the chips, ...

Large software developers and end users have softened their former staunch insistence that software had to be either purchased from an external vendor or created in-house. The build vs. buy debate has evolved into a shinier, happier present moment in which the super-sized software development firms ...

Consumer and business product manufacturers are challenged to form and maintain relationships with their end users. One-off promotions like contests or sweepstakes can help to supply manufacturers with some contact information for their customers, but most times, not much else. Unless there is a poi...