Enterprise Apps

"It takes two to tango." Ronald Reagan said this of the contentious relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the final stages of the Cold War. Unfortunately, this also applies to executives and project management offices. At times, it seems they are destined to face off against...

The logistics industry is facing challenges in adopting a sustainable and profitable CRM strategy, and there is inertia when it comes to replacing or augmenting disparate CRM solutions adopted by different business units, like retail, as well as various channels, like phone, Web, email, etc. These ...

The mainframe application forms the core of the system where the bulk of the order processing takes place. The traditional mainframe UI in, say, SCOBOL (Screen COBOL) is being augmented/replaced through the front-ending applications built in VB, ASP, .Net, etc. The front-end screens fetch the custo...

Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud has been released -- it's the first Radian6 product to come to market after the company's acquisition by Salesforce.com earlier this year. It is also the first product in which Salesforce.com's functionality has been tightly embedded in the Radian6 feature set, althoug...

Forrester Research has been heating up the marketplace lately with a string of interesting reports and forecasts that impact CRM and the front office generally. One that I saw, "Capitalizing on Live Video Chat" by Diane Clarkson talks about the bright future of using video rather than text chat in ...

The logistics industry faces several challenges with the tremendous growth observed in the last two decades. Global manufacturers in industries such as automotive, IT and consumer goods have outsourced supply chain activities such as distribution and warehousing to third parties. The industry has be...

On an otherwise slow news week, I spotted a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia. The article was on Business Insider, and I found it interesting. The headline told the story, as good headlines often do. "What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP Do...

Results Software has rolled out the latest iteration of its longstanding CRM business suite product. In this version, it builds on its recent three-way integration with QuickBooks, Outlook and SmartVault. That integration with three applications widely used by small- and medium-sized companies is wh...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." For the record, I am an ERP dilatant -- I know about it but don't follow it with the same passion that I follow CRM. And as far as SAP is concerned, I have ra...

You have probably transacted business with Paciolan at some point in your life, even if you don't recognize the name. Perhaps you did it just by purchasing event tickets. Paciolan is a 30-year-old, private-label vendor that powers ticket sales for college athletic games, professional sports and perf...

If you've been in this business any length of time, you've become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what's...

A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog j...

Salesforce.com has a developed a new tool for companies to help them develop and publish Web pages and landing pages specifically for marketing campaigns. The tool, called "Siteforce," is built on the Force.com platform. It focuses specifically on new technologies that legacy content management syst...

At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss?...

Microsoft is rolling out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for both the partner-hosted and on-premises deployments. The update includes its promised "Activity Feeds," as well as administrative enhancements and stepped-up disaster recovery practices. Microsoft has put Dynamics CRM on...