Enterprise Apps

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

Microsoft's latest CRM release takes a giant step from previous versions, adding several key functions to its Dynamics CRM 3.0. Although the company said the new version will be more competitive with CRM giants Oracle and SAP, one analyst said Microsoft is still playing mostly in the small and mediu...

The path to SOA must consider several typical approaches. SOA adoption is a gradual process. While some organizations dabble with Web services by wrapping applications as a means of exploring the world of SOA and deciding how to proceed, others engage in enterprise-wide business transformation. Othe...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

When Oracle agreed early in September to buy former rival Siebel Systems for US$5.85 billion, some questioned how long Siebel would continue its CRM OnDemand service. That question came to light because Oracle rival IBM plays a big role in the on-demand service. Yesterday, Siebel responded with the ...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for ...

In an effort to strengthen its market position in the retail industry, SAP today announced it is acquiring a privately-held Canadian point-of-sale software provider. SAP said it plans to purchase Toronto-based Triversity, whose product portfolio includes traditional and enterprise point-of-sale, sto...

Today's organizations increasingly experience the creep from the general tracking of customer contacts and responses by CRM to the general tracking of marketing activities and their returns by the CFO. Marketers have to look at the bigger picture, at their contribution to the entire enterprise, rat...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

Today, the CDI market has attracted several technology vendors from areas like ERP, CRM, data quality, and master data management. Unfortunately, while there is consensus that a CDI hub is critical for tying distributed customer data into unified views, there is rampant confusion on how best to imp...

If bad data is put into a data warehouse, companies risk what Tony Fisher, president and general manager at DataFlux, described as "code, load and explode." "If the data from a source system doesn't meet the expected qualities for that data, the loading process may fail, causing the company to stop ...

Oracle announced a compromise today on its licensing fee structure for dual-core Intel or AMD processors, which moves it closer in line with other software vendors. The database vendor had originally said it would continue to calculate licensing fees for its database and middleware products based on...

Partitioning of servers in the data centers of its top customers is putting pressure on Oracle, which is making a number of moves to cope with the trend, experts say. Earlier this month, Oracle changed its licensing terms for users of Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10.0 operating system, lowering the pri...

There's a growing ground-swell of interest in many companies today around the valuation of their homegrown ERP, CRM, order capture and service applications. This issue has come to the forefront for several reasons, the two most dominant ones being many companies are looking seriously at the marketa...