Enterprise Apps

Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 custo...

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen should take note of last week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry. It repr...

Thanks for the overwhelming response to last week's post, "Why CRM Works." It was surprising and gratifying that so many people read and tweeted about it, given its length -- almost double my usual contribution. Since it was based on Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking work, I give all the credit to h...

Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent ne...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing...

Can you tell me exactly where your employees are and what they are doing? Do you know what the top 10 most profitable projects were for your company last year? Can you make a bid on a project that has little or no margin of error? If you can't answer these questions, then you should know that someon...

To get a sense of all the wonderfulness surrounding Convergence, you need only glance at some of the many observations made by the likes of Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Dennis Howlett, Josh Greenbaum and many others. So kudos to Microsoft. My observations will be somewhat different. While I also t...

Microsoft is stepping up its cloud strategy, with the announcement that it will port its Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning software to Windows Azure this year. The company outlined plans for the transition at Convergence 2012, held last week in Houston. Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics G...

Gmail sales productivity application Yesware does not align with any particular CRM vendor or industry or even sales methodology. That possibly accounts for its wide- ranging and especially large user base, said founder and CEO Matthew Bellows. In six months, Yesware has picked up 20,000 business us...

The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their jux...

If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present -- and the future -- and Jobs and Gates were only playing part...

M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. The solution will help customers manage data from their business phone system and othe...

Avaya is formalizing an outsourcing service it has been offering select clients for the past year. The service, Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions, manages all of a company's communications operations, regardless of age, location or vendor. It is part of the company's portfolio of Managed Se...

The Columbus Blue Jackets are a team in the National Hockey League, which means their revenue stream thrives -- or dies -- on how well they can sell tickets. The team has an extensive and sophisticated sales operation that fields nearly 300 calls per day. However, the team wanted tech support for it...

FirstRain, an analytics software company that provides personalized, real-time customer intelligence to sales and marketing professionals, has announced the launch of the first Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. The system delivers targeted customer, prospect and industry intelligence directly...