Enterprise Apps

Another best-of-breed business intelligence vendor has been snapped up: This time, it is Cognos, which IBM has agreed to acquire for $5 billion in cash, or roughly $58 per share. The move was widely anticipated, given the recent acquisitions made by IBM's rivals in this space. Earlier this year, SAP...

Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thin. Even when the best interface designs are in place, customers are abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the "Contact Center Analytics" benchmark were either seeing poorer performa...

OK, I get it. I went to the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week and there was a lot to like about it. In my career, I have seen some major back and forth changes in selling, and I have to say that these changes relate more to what is being offered than who we are selling to. Every salesp...

Sage Software has upgraded ACT by Sage for Real Estate 2008 (10.0) and ACT by Sage Premium for Real Estate 2008 (10.0) contact and customer management applications. These were introduced last year as ACT's first vertical offerings. The company rolled out the two new versions during its Sage Summit c...

Calabrio has upgraded its workforce optimization products, which go to market through several channel partners, including as an OEM to Cisco's Unified Contact Center product line. The company upgraded Workforce Management to version 8.1 and Quality Management to version 2.4. The latter in particular...

NetSuite has introduced SuiteBundler, a new platform for its channel partners. The product is a new component in its development and integration toolset, SuiteFlex. SuiteBundler offers a new generation of development tools for its third-party channel partners so they can continue to create vertical ...

Not too long ago, advice to keep a CRM implementation simple would have focused around due diligence for the application. It would have focused on negotiating the best deal with a systems integrator. Most of all, it would have focused on a clear needs assessment driving the application. That was the...

Microsoft has cut by almost half the cost of its CRM Live application for partners, bringing its price point down to $15 per user per month. The price cut, of course, is part of Microsoft's ongoing support for its partner network that the company must leverage to make inroads in the Software as a Se...

SAP has had a wealth of good news to share this week, as it announced a planned acquisition, reported rosy earnings and scored a significant coup. First, with an eye toward ramping up its capabilities in business rules management, SAP announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire Yasu Technologies. S...

"We need more leads!" cries the sales manager. "What happened to the ones we gave you last month?" replies the marketing manager. "Those leads were lousy" retorts the increasingly frustrated sales manager... and so goes the never-ending lead "quality vs. quantity" debate in many organizations. New r...

CorraTech, an open source software services firm, introduced Opensuite, a pre-beta release of its latest open source endeavor. The project is an open source-based integration of -- for now -- three of the leading open source applications in rich e-mail, document management and CRM. "This is a pre-pa...

Journyx, a provider of Web-based time tracking and project accounting applications, has released a stripped-down version of some of this functionality for the consulting industry. Called the "Customer Cost Tracker," the Software as a Service tool's primary purpose is to help consulting and other ser...

Once the software industry absorbed this week's news that SAP would be acquiring the French business intelligence vendor Business Objects for close to $7 billion, speculation immediately shifted to what would happen to Cognos. With Oracle's digestion of Hyperion complete and the Business Objects sal...

Interactive Intelligence introduced a new iteration of its flagship contact center automation and enterprise IP telephone software platform. Customer Interaction Center and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center version 3.0 include upgraded security, new deployment and integration technologies, as w...

SAP has announced it will acquire Business Objects for about $6.78 billion. The French business intelligence vendor is one of the few assets on the market able to go head to head with Hyperion, which Oracle bought earlier this year for $3.3 billion. The acquisition will allow SAP to move into the BI...