Enterprise Apps

Beagle Research is exploring one of the few categories of online videos that thus far has escaped formal scrutiny: the marketing videos of software -- specifically, CRM companies. The research group has announced "The Beagle Short Tale Awards" for 2011. A panel of five industry experts rated about 1...

Consumers are spending more time and money online today than ever before. They start and end their day checking email and popping onto social gaming and shopping sites. This often comes at the expense of other entertainment options like traditional television, film or even spending an evening out....

OpenERP has rolled out version 6.0 of its open source ERP product. It is the first upgrade of OpenERP in close to two years, with significant enhancements to its business applications. Going forward, the company has committed to more frequent releases of its major versions and point releases. "Our c...

In a first for the product line, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer debuted the cloud version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 release. "Sales professionals are at the heart of almost every successful business," Ballmer said. Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives them a familiar user experience, enables greater c...

Pegasystems has introduced its second major cloud offering within the last year: Pega Cloud for CRM. It follows the company's release of Pega Cloud for BPM. While the functionality is different, the application's approach to cloud computing is the same. In both cloud applications, the company takes ...

This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He'd done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated. After that, however, he started finding new problems -- which he then found solut...

We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so eve...

Oracle is debuting a business intelligence module -- for SAP users. Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP is designed to help SAP users wring more value out of their financial systems. While they are at it, Oracle no doubt hopes, these users may opt to migrate more of their operations to the Oracle pla...

In April and May 2010, Aberdeen surveyed 422 executives from a variety of different industries, and the results were clear: Rapid forecasters -- companies that collect and prepare reliable sales forecasts in less than half an hour -- significantly outperform slow forecasters in terms of their curren...

The cost of business travel is going up and up and up and, oh yeah, Happy New Year. Forget all the CRM prognostications you've been reading over the holidays, the only one of significance to your business and to CRM is what you'll be paying to get in front of customers. Last week a former Shell Oil...

LiveOps, a contact center software and call center outsourcing provider, recently announced six new features designed to enhance its contact center cloud solution. The enhancements include Call Flow Authoring Studio, configurable recording, real-time configurable dashboards, call visualization repor...

"Call rewrite!" That's what they said in the olden days on movie sets when the script needed doctoring. It's also what the technology industry metaphorically does about every 10 years. We rewrite much of what we've been relying on for information processing because the accumulation of new technologi...

There are two types of behavioral analytics. The first kind is "aggregate" analytics. This is what you can see when pulling reports from an Omniture or Webtrends. It shows you things like how many impressions, how many pages viewed on your website, which pages are most popular, or even the path a pr...

Zoho has enhanced its CRM app with new accounting and telephony functionality via integration with QuickBooks and several telephony systems. Zoho CRM for QuickBooks and Zoho PhoneBridge -- which hooks into PBX systems from Asterisk, Avaya, Elastix, and Trixbox -- each take about 20 to 30 minutes to ...

It's amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word "unique," which means one of a kind. If you add "very" or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today's word might be "amazing." There is entir...