Cloud Computing

Microsoft has announced it is purchasing Nuance Communications, a natural language to computer processing company, in a deal valued at $19.7 billion. "Nuance's popular healthcare-focused products and services will provide Microsoft an instant revenue stream and relationships with existing Nuance cus...

Even the most customer-centric businesses can overestimate their performance or miss the broad trends in customer behavior. That is why NICE inContact conducts annual surveys that track the customer experience from the perspective of businesses and consumers. CRM Buyer discussed the recent findings...

With most workers continuing to work remotely, CRM has become an important tool for managing relationship risk. Financial firms have to deal with market and operational risk, consumer retailers have to focus on supply chain risk, and all companies have to keep an eye on economic risk. Relationship r...

Cloud cybersecurity -- or a lack of it -- is feeding a frenzy of companies out of the public cloud. A similar concern about managing compliance obligations is keeping organizations from moving to the cloud in general. However, much of the growing concerns over cloud cybersecurity result from experie...

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence or machine language to automate their marketing campaigns. A survey by Rackspace Technol...

In the old days you could identify weak spots in your business and purchase software systems designed to eliminate or at least to significantly reduce those liabilities. Performing an ROI analysis usually consisted of two parts: a before study to determine the business' steady state; and a post impl...

Two CRM vendors made news recently. Zoho had an analyst conference that reminded us that many businesses don't benefit enough from verticalized suites; and Microsoft introduced several vertical industry systems, including one for nonprofits. One could say that Zoho and Microsoft displayed mirror ima...

Desktop as a Service provider Shells offers a new component to virtual cloud computing. It brings Linux distros and Windows 10 to any computer, mobile device, and some game consoles, via any Web browser. The U.S.-based startup went online in the first quarter of last year. Since then, CEO and founde...

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise and it b...

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, ramping up the data privacy threats they pose to government agencies and businesses alike. Governments both domestic and foreign need to step up efforts to pass legislation that bolsters technological defenses this year, warn privacy groups. Stiffer privacy ...

Amazon gets a new chief executive this summer. Jeff Bezos plans to step down from that role and transition into a new job -- executive chair of Amazon. The chief of Amazon's cloud computing division, Andy Jassy, will become Amazon's new chief executive. Jassy served in that post in a temporary capac...

If you step back and look at what the tech sector has demonstrated to us through COVID, you can feel impressed. Early in the crisis vendors like Salesforce and Zoho began offering their products for free, or at low cost, to companies and end users suddenly faced with working at home. Oracle, Salesfo...

Maintaining and increasing research and development spending in the COVID-19 era is critical for high technology vendors to deliver new solutions and services, continue to innovate, and position their businesses to rebound from the negative effects of the global pandemic. Analysts, financial adviso...

The idea that CRM products should be priced according to the utility they deliver sounds good, but it raises a lot of questions too. With value pricing, you might expect the cost of CRM to rise and fall as a business gets more or less use and value from its investment, but who gets to determine the ...