CRM

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, ...

Fast-growing Jive Software offers businesses an extensible social business solution that integrates social networking, collaboration software, community software and social media monitoring across the entire enterprise. The company recently bolstered its board of directors with a number of executive...

One of the great promises of the social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. There's a gulf between small businesses, which may speak or eve...

SugarCRM made enhancements in four areas in the Sugar 6 Spring 2011 release: CRM made global, CRM made mobile, CRM made social, and Sugar as a platform. SugarCRM will also work more on integration with IBM's Lotus family of products. Its acquisition of iExtensions could move its Lotus integration ro...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of o...

Recently, a customer was using the Navy Federal Credit Union ATM and encountered some difficulty with his account. He whipped out his mobile device and tweeted to the world that he was having problems. You can probably guess what happened next: He received a return tweet shortly afterward. However, ...

Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other onli...

Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recentl...

Gulf Cooperation Council banks have begun to feel the heat of competitive pressure from foreign banks that are trying to exploit the potential investment prospects in this market by riding on their vast experience and proven consumer-friendly services. In such a scenario, the banks have nothing to ...

As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don't have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses -- mostly small -- are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the...

I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day, and while I don't usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I've been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven't thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as...

Last week, at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco, the tech industry waited with bated breath for HP CEO Leo Apotheker's first presentation as CEO. Surely, the theory went, he would make a startling pronouncement describing a twist in the company's strategy -- say, a greater focus on developing its ...

Consumers face a staggering number of online choices. This reality comes as a burden to e-commerce companies that watch more than 95 percent of visitors leave before making a purchase, despite all the money spent on SEO, search and other customer acquisition tactics. While once a niche tactic, reta...

Oracle CRM On Demand for Partner Relationship Management has integrated a social application that gives users a sense of what customers, partners and employees are saying about a particular sale or activity or client -- and in an orderly fashion. The challenge Accept360 addresses with its applicatio...

On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies, but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times. As a social learning...