Enterprise Apps

Channel partner opportunity management firm BlueRoads announced on Sept. 17 a new lead referral module designed to help vendors gain strategic insight into the management of better sales channel yield. The new software module captures new referrals from a vendor's extended partner community and harn...

The big news when Saleforce.com released its latest version of what is hot in the CRM space -- Winter '08 -- was Force.com. The immediately understood subtext was that Salesforce.com had officially begun its migration to a platform on-demand company, launching the first salvo in what Denis Pombriant...

Just a couple of weeks ago, two terms, on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS), were used interchangeably -- it was truly a difference without a distinction -- but a lot has changed in a short time. First, Salesforce.com introduced Force.com, and a day later SAP announced a long awaited on-demand...

IBM made several developments in its RFID partner and product platform that should make software and hardware integration of the technology easier for firms, the company said. For starters, standards organization GS1 EPCglobal has certified the IBM WebSphere RFID Information Center as fully complian...

With an eye toward minimizing its carbon footprint, Wal-Mart Stores will partner with the Carbon Disclosure Project to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain. An initial pilot project will focus on seven commonly used product categories -- DVDs, toothpaste, ...

SAS added a new application to its lineup of customer service analytical offerings. SAS Real Time Decision Manager embeds analytically driven decision logic at every customer interaction. The Decision Manager tool was introduced during Gartner's CRM conference this week, along with an updated versio...

SAP, which has developed and acquired a number of applications for small and medium-sized companies, added yet another to its line up. SAP Business ByDesign is an on-demand enterprise suite aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees that do not have strong internal IT support. The application prov...

Analytic software provider Verint released the first update of its Audiolog application since its acquisition of Mercom last year. A call recording and monitoring application designed for small and medium-sized business contact centers, Audiolog incorporates enterprise-level features that have been ...

Salesforce.com added two functional areas to its CRM and introduced its Force.com platform with the rollout of its Winter '08 release. The new product lines are Salesforce.com Content and Salesforce.com Ideas, which provide content management and a Web 2.0 environment for collaboration in the enterp...

The contact center has become the focal point of customer interaction. The method by which the customer interacts with the contact center dwarfs all other modes of interaction. Whether it occurs via phone, chat, e-mail, self-service Web or self-service IVR, the customer is inundating the contact cen...

In the ultimate game of bait-and-switch, several Web sites try to pass off a bot as a bod. That is to say that Live Chat is offered to users, but there's no flesh-and-blood person on the line, there's only a chat bot making a robotic guess at what the user might want to know. Few are fooled by the s...

CentricCRM, a developer of open source CRM aimed at larger enterprises, is set to release an update of its flagship product, CentricCRM 5.0, next month, CEO David Richards told CRM Buyer. "This will be a very significant release for us," he said, pointing to new platform-level support for third part...

Although some people are still trying to enjoy the last of the summer weather, the retail holiday shopping season has begun. With that, inevitably, comes the peak e-mail marketing season. The holiday e-mail season started last year on Sept. 6 with a Christmas reference in a Sam's Club e-mail, accord...

Aspect Software has introduced a series of software modules under one suite aimed at optimization performance in the contact center. The modules are for workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management and coaching and e-learning. Called "Performanc...

Dave Duffield, most famously the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday, was giving a keynote presentation at the RightNow user conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., when it hit me. Duffield is about to become a kingmaker in the on-demand market. Please forgive the apparent hyperbole and continue.