Enterprise Apps

Retailers' approach to interaction between e-commerce and the contact center is changing. The online and call center channels are starting to meld together, and perspectives on how retailers handle the two have to change. A typical shopping experience today may go something like this: The customer b...

Most health insurance companies have plowed resources into self-service Web sites for their policyholders -- Web site portals that display page after page of details on coverage. Yet the general perception, even among many industry insiders, is that health insurance providers are not customer-friend...

If you could clone your best agent hundreds or thousands of times over, you could ensure that each and every customer calling your contact center receives the same high-quality, friendly and informed response. In reality, natural language speech self-service is probably the closest and best alternat...

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer sati...

SAP will offer new business process and rules management capabilities for its NetWeaver service-oriented architecture platform. NetWeaver Business Process Management and NetWeaver Business Rules Management will allow companies to build or change business processes and rules without coding. "Industry...

SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications. The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the ad...

SugarCRM has released version 5.1 of its open source CRM platform, building on functionality it debuted in last year's milestone 5.0 release, which included new development tools, a new Ajax e-mail client, and a new multi-instance on-demand architecture. Among the new features in version 5.1 are enh...

Combining in-memory data management, visual analytics, social networking and rich Internet applications, Software as a Service and open source software development, companies such as Advizor Solutions, Fractal Edge, Greenplum, LucidEra and others are filling what was an open niche in the BI marketpl...

It's official. With the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is now formally a player -- a big one -- in the online CRM space. The general availability release seems almost anticlimactic, given that so many of its features and functions are the same as those in Dynamics C...

The big CRM news of the week was Salesforce.com's tie-up with Google to embed its CRM application in the search engine provider's productivity suite. Plenty in the industry were wowed by the development -- not all, though. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu can be counted among the latter. Zoho is an on-demand ...

In a year of consolidation in a hot business intelligence marketplace, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP secured leading positions in 2007. This has cleared the way for a new generation of BI specialists to emerge and take root. "We like to compare the massive consolidation we saw in 2007 to a forest c...

They may be still waiting for the first signs of the much advertised recession in the Bay Area. Everything I see here, especially this week, points to growth and all that goes with it. Multiple people have come up to me, phoned or e-mailed seeking introductions or support as they confess to having i...

On-demand applications and cloud computing often mean different things to different people. For developers, Software as a Service is quickly evolving not only as a means to deliver applications -- but as the means to develop them, too. Taking the notion of "development as a service" to its full pote...

Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition fe...

IBM is unveiling upgrades to its WebSphere Premises Server at Impact, its SOA event taking place in Las Vegas this week. The buffed-up SOA software -- Version 6.1 -- and IBM's RFID Information Center will be the two main product spotlights at the event. The cumulative effect of the improvements is t...