Exclusives

With last summer's launch of Avaya Aura and the purchase of Nortel Enterprise Solutions and Nortel Government Solutions in December, Avaya has placed itself squarely in the No. 1 spot for the global enterprise telephony and unified communications, audio conferencing, enterprise messaging and contact...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...

Business Intelligence has evolved considerably in the last several years. At one time the domain of PhDs or other highly trained employees, it has become accessible to the masses. Indeed, one of the competitive differentiators among the vendors in the market -- from the huge stack players to the sma...

Tigerpaw Software is a family-owned software company that, 24 years after it was founded, is about to enter a new phase of growth. The company's enterprise CRM, inventory and project management platform has always had a loyal following, in no small part because of the care and attention Tigerpaw lav...

Before the arrival of sales force automation and marketing campaign software, there were productivity applications. CRM, as we all know, rose from that fundamental platform of email, calendaring, mailing list management and task management. A lot of CRM vendors include productivity in their CRM apps...

PRM has an intriguing business case: It applies the concepts and tools of customer relationship management to the business relationships that also affect a company's customer base. The problem with PRM is that it hasn't caught on -- for myriad reasons, starting with its expense and difficulty in imp...

Around the time when Software as a Service was pre-empting the on-premise vendors, SugarCRM burst onto the CRM scene with its own disruptive business mode: open source for CRM. The build-it-yourself model wasn't for everybody, of course -- or so many thought at the time. As SugarCRM continues to ref...

The Business Intelligence space has been on a mission for several years. The goal: to simplify the way these applications work for the end-user. Several years ago, one practically needed a Ph.D. to be able to eke out usable data. Today, most line of business users can get the same results. Noetix is...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...