Enterprise Apps

In today's online environments, a bad customer experience can become visible more quickly and have more lasting consequences than ever before. More and more customer interactions are taking place online, thanks to a combination of factors that make the Web an attractive place for doing business: spe...

This is the marketing resource management world, according to Manticore CEO Jeff Erramouspe: There are the enterprise-oriented types of platforms that can handle robust applications. Their downside is that they require consultants to manage their difficult implementations and dedicated personnel for...

For decades, companies have leveraged technology with the twin goals of reducing the cost of customer support while improving its quality and dependability. This is reflected in the significant investments many organizations have made in providing information, products and services through self-serv...

My ride from San Francisco Airport to Redwood Shores, Calif., tells the story of my entire trip to the West Coast last week. Southbound on Route 101, traffic was lighter than I was accustomed to in my more than 10 years of visiting the area. Northbound, there was a five-mile backup, which caused m...

M.A. Ketabchi, president, CEO and founder of business process management provider Savvion, might have done just as well focusing on product marketing in his career. From the beginning, he has distinguished Savvion from the competition by concentrating on the one thing potential customers care abou...

LexisNexis is enhancing its customer relationship management product, InterAction CRM, with its version of social networking functionality. Called "InterAction IQ," the tool delves into the CRM app and the Exchange Server to establish which users have relationships with certain clients or prospectiv...

Companies seeking to organize and centralize customer, account and opportunity information are leveraging sales force automation and customer relationship management tools to provide sales managers with better visibility into internal operations and improve overall sales productivity. Despite the pr...

Due to the economy, many businesses are now looking at project portfolio management solutions to help them isolate and execute mission-critical projects more effectively. These businesses have also found that Software as a Service solutions are both more affordable and easier to deploy than traditi...

It is has been a roller-coaster year for E2open CEO Mark Woodward, mainly because that is how long he has been at the helm of the Software as a Service provider of supply-and-demand chain, procurement, and B2B integration applications. Over the past twelve months at E2open, the erstwhile senior advi...

There are dozens of webinars, seminars, research reports, whitepapers, and blog postings on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Despite the endless flow of resources and suggestions, sales and marketing alignment continues to elude many organizations. Misalignment is often a byproduct of a...

The universe of enterprise resource planning providers is huge; ditto for open source. The space where twain meet? Not so much. xTuple is an open source ERP provider, and CEO Ned Lilly says there are few fellow travelers on his company's path. In this tanking economy, the company has been leveraging...

"You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!" -- "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" It seems painfully obvious now, but to the characters in Reese's famous candy commercials of the 1970s and 1980s, chocolate and peanut butter do actually go together quite well. In fact, what the initially...

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in. Enter Marketo, a startup whose raison d'etre is to get people to buy. Surprisingly -- or not, given its product lineup -- Marketo is d...

The most valuable asset of a company is its good name. Yet the rapid growth of the Internet and the explosion of social media, in particular, have made it infinitely more challenging for a company to protect its good name. Recent examples abound of how, owing to the viral effect of social media, ord...

Clara Shih is a friend I met through Salesforce.com. She recently published "The Facebook Era," which looks at the relationship of social networking to front office computing. She is really busy these days promoting the book, and she recently left Salesforce to pursue new ideas in social networkin...