Enterprise Apps

There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way. To r...

The concept of "the funnel" is a sacred cow in marketing. The basic concept of leads progressing through a series of steps of escalating interaction until they finally make a purchase is intuitive. At the macro level, it is fairly easy to model the funnel and assign labels to each step -- awareness,...

Imagine this all-too-common scenario: A customer needs to add a new line to his cellphone plan. He's had a number of reception and phone issues, and he will stay with his current company only if offered a very good deal. However, the agent -- unaware of the prolonged dissatisfaction and insensitive ...

The greatest obstacle small business operators face in adopting business process management is themselves. That factor could account for the underutilization of BPM by small businesses -- and the reason BPM vendors have targeted the small business sector as a huge potential market. Of course, the ab...

One business sector weathering the current economic downturn is that of business intelligence. In fact, Hans Hultgren, director of the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence program at Daniels College of Business, told CRM Buyer that business intelligence is growing and will continue to do so. "...

In November 2008, Aberdeen published a study titled, "Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation." The survey captured the challenges and strategies from 213 organizations and found that on average, 16 percent of the total leads that are deemed "sales-ready opportunities" actually clo...

These days it's hard to have a conversation that doesn't eventually roll around to the state of THE ECONOMY. What's amazing is that, at this point, no one needs to use adjectives when they refer to THE ECONOMY. We've stopped bothering with words like "bad," "down" or "tough." We all know how things ...

Five years ago, megadeals were all the rage in the business process outsourcing (BPO) world. Global players such as IBM, Accenture, ACS and CSC were racking up billion-dollar multiyear contracts, mainly for accounting, human resource and procurement functions. Now that's changing. "What we can say i...

Oracle is giving users of JD Edwards -- one of the myriad enterprise software suites the company has acquired over the last decade -- a new set of tools to leverage through its value chain planning applications. It's upgrading the JD Edwards offering with a bundle of SCM-related applications and bes...

Nothing like a recession to spur business growth. In the BPM space, the current downturn has presented a major marketing opportunity for software and IT service firms. Sparked by customers seeking to cut costs and by innovations in e-commerce, the BPM market could easily double over the next several...

One of the key benefits of branded online communities relates to the idea of treating customers as cocreators or codevelopers. With the advent of social networking, companies can further automate and expand their efforts to involve customers in the innovation process. For most companies, innovation ...

There are always niche vendors developing new applications around functionality that doesn't quite fit into a defined software category. When the analyst community takes note -- and then decides to give the category a name -- a bona fide trend is established. That is happening to SpringCM -- a Softw...

Today's revenue cycle is broken. Sales reps spend half their time cold-calling leads instead of interacting with interested prospects, while marketing invests its shrinking budget on costly programs and prospect lists that yield low conversion rates. The two departments seemingly operate in separate...

In the past, businesses typically used lists of leads in a type of marketing strategy that Michael Port, author of "Book Yourself Solid," refers to as "interruption marketing." The goal was to get in front of a potential customer, book an appointment, and sell the product. However, that model is ch...

What a summer for remembrances. Forty years ago, a couple of people landed on the moon, and a half-million of them landed on Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival. That might sound like ancient history, but of course without the space program, who knows where the technolo...