Enterprise Apps

B2B integration provider Extol International has introduced a middleware application aimed at the upper midmarket. Business Extenders, a subset of its main product line, Extol Business Integrator, is designed to address one-off pain points in the IT environment: a sales manager's inability to see th...

Three months after BEA Systems rejected its first unsolicited offer of $6.7 billion, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring the middleware and business process management vendor after all -- for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share. That's a 14 percent premium over its first bid and a 24 percent pr...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just mu...

Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thinner and thinner. Even with the best interface designs in place, customers are still abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the Aberdeen Contact Center Analytics benchmark report are...

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform. The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data m...

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers. I got to thinking about this after watching the movie "Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finc...

Analyzing data from more than 170 survey respondents from various global organizations, Aberdeen highlights how Best-in-Class organizations are instituting well-defined service level agreements as part of a holistic approach to their BPO initiative not only to decrease expenses, but also to realize ...

I own an iPod. Do you? If so, do we have anything in common? Apple is hoping that we do, and it's providing plenty of room for us to find out at the iTunes Store. There, music lovers can write and read reviews of artists' recent, and not-so-recent, releases. Perhaps more commercially important, they...

B. Joseph Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time. Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre &...

The new year is here and marketers are putting the finishing touches on their budgets and plans for 2008. However, before we move forward, there are some trends from 2007 that are worth continuing in the coming year. One trend that is top of many minds is the increased focus on customer relationship...

Return on investment figures for a Software as a Service implementation can be surprisingly difficult to generalize. One measure often cited in the industry is that one year is a reasonable period in which firms can expect to see a project deliver returns, with the larger-sized investments bringing ...

The pressure to increase top-line revenue growth is uniting sales and marketing executives to focus resources on aligning their two groups. In October, Aberdeen Group surveyed over 250 companies to identify the strategies, capabilities and enablers that Best in Class companies are using to improve s...

Oracle beat many Wall Street predictions in its second fiscal quarter, reporting $1.3 billion in net income and a year-over-year 36 percent increase in stock earnings. The increase in quarterly profit equated to 25 cents per share. The Redwood Shores, Calif., software giant raked in $5.3 billion in ...

The latest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM -- 4.0, formerly code-named "Titan" -- is complete and released to manufacturing. In other words, the long-awaited application has shipped from Microsoft's engineering group and is now available from electronic download for new and existing customers. The...

Incentive compensation is often the first place where management makes adjustments in efforts to improve sales productivity. Many organizations have departed from the straight commission model in favor of plans that prompt the sales force to target high-profit deals. However, when a salesperson is p...