CRM

At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. Most of the application...

Cloud contact center provider inContact has released the first of what will be three major upgrades to its flagship product this year. New features in the release touch upon many areas, from agent scripting to a Web-connect module, new unified agent desktop tools and an expanded blended dialer. Most...

Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent ne...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing...

To get a sense of all the wonderfulness surrounding Convergence, you need only glance at some of the many observations made by the likes of Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Dennis Howlett, Josh Greenbaum and many others. So kudos to Microsoft. My observations will be somewhat different. While I also t...

Microsoft is stepping up its cloud strategy, with the announcement that it will port its Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning software to Windows Azure this year. The company outlined plans for the transition at Convergence 2012, held last week in Houston. Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics G...

Gmail sales productivity application Yesware does not align with any particular CRM vendor or industry or even sales methodology. That possibly accounts for its wide- ranging and especially large user base, said founder and CEO Matthew Bellows. In six months, Yesware has picked up 20,000 business us...

If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present -- and the future -- and Jobs and Gates were only playing part...

M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. The solution will help customers manage data from their business phone system and othe...

Avaya is formalizing an outsourcing service it has been offering select clients for the past year. The service, Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions, manages all of a company's communications operations, regardless of age, location or vendor. It is part of the company's portfolio of Managed Se...

In the UK, supermarket chain Tesco is being pounded right now in social media channels because it's refusing to honor an erroneous online advertisement offering new iPads for about $65. The offer went viral, and now the backlash is viral, too. How Tesco responds will tell the tale. I'd recommend a s...

The Columbus Blue Jackets are a team in the National Hockey League, which means their revenue stream thrives -- or dies -- on how well they can sell tickets. The team has an extensive and sophisticated sales operation that fields nearly 300 calls per day. However, the team wanted tech support for it...

A friend of mine bought a car that is, to be honest, a lot more than he really needs. It has all the bells and whistles, wrapped in a lovely paint job and a plush leather interior. Yet every time I ride in it, I discover something that he's overlooked. Yes, Randy -- this would be where you plug in y...

You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator -- with the exception of monthly recurring revenue that subscription companies measure -- it only tells you where you've been, ...

FirstRain, an analytics software company that provides personalized, real-time customer intelligence to sales and marketing professionals, has announced the launch of the first Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. The system delivers targeted customer, prospect and industry intelligence directly...