Enterprise Apps

In this heated battle for the consumer dollar, retail marketers are looking to establish a personal and consistent relationship with shoppers through integrated customer loyalty programs that leverage traditional offline and emerging communications channels. Not surprisingly, it can be overwhelming ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom on Tuesday for $105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering. Peeling the onion and t...

On July 11, when Apple had barely started to sell its much-anticipated iPhone 3G, Salesforce.com became the first customer relationship management vendor to announce the availability of its mobile applications for the iPhone in Apple's App Store. Now, two weeks after the phone's release, a few other...

NetSuite has added new features to its NetSuite CRM+ flagship product, focusing on building new and tweaking existing marketing automation and knowledge management workflows for customer support and service. NetSuite also announced support for Firefox 3, the latest version of the Web browser from th...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am o...

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, and Sonoma Partners' Mike Snyder summed up the event's highlights. "Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention," he wrote. "During the opening k...

As more buyers and sellers look to the Web and as other parties in the real estate value chain move to Web-enabled business software platforms, the real estate industry has begun to embrace CRM as a sales tool. While enterprise-level leaders such as Oracle and SAP don't have specific CRM offerings f...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading theme...

Lyris has upgraded its flagship product and rolled out a new application for the marketing and advertising industry. The enhancements to Lyris HQ pave the way for a steady addition of collaboration and social networking tools this year. Lyris HQ for Agencies, meanwhile, will provide an inroad into a...

Over the past year, the business intelligence landscape has transformed drastically. Formerly, this market was comprised of a vast collection of solution providers, but it has evolved to just four major players -- IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These BI titans have expanded through acquisition, sna...

On-demand business-to-business marketing vendor Genius.com has developed a new collaborative e-mail marketing module that focuses on lead qualification and prioritization. MarketingGenius brings together the sales and marketing departments. To a certain extent, it adds a service element, as the pros...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the ma...

The launch of Healthline Networks' HealthSTAT last week is one more indication that the Internet ad platform wars are far from over. To be sure, Google remains the giant to beat -- and it looks as though it's settling into its role as the long-term dominant player. However, HealthSTAT may be on the ...

Amdocs and IBM have entered into an original equipment manufacturer agreement in which Amdocs will embed the IBM DB2 Data Server and the IBM Optim Data Growth application in its CRM product line. It is the first OEM agreement IBM has inked involving Optim, Steve Tallant, senior manager of product li...