Exclusives

Channel partner opportunity management firm BlueRoads announced on Sept. 17 a new lead referral module designed to help vendors gain strategic insight into the management of better sales channel yield. The new software module captures new referrals from a vendor's extended partner community and harn...

When Dave Asiala, Dow Chemical's shared services IT director, is talking about his company's RFID initiatives and wants listeners to have an "Aha" moment, he tells them about Dow AgroSciences' use of RFID tags in its in-ground Sentricon Termite Colony Elimination System. "Essentially these are bait ...

In late November, AT&T's Sterling Commerce acquired Comergent, a competitor in the e-commerce/order hub management platform market, for $155 million in cash. The merger brought together two industry leading companies, though they operated on different orders of magnitude. In this interview with ...

Earlier this month, Sage Software announced it had acquired one of its longtime partners, Corum, a Canada-based provider of CRM technology. It was a significant deal for the company, said Dave Batt, senior vice president and general manager of Global CRM, as the acquired technology matches one of th...

In an era of prevalent outsourcing -- some of it hurriedly agreed to without due diligence -- Artifact aims through its Scorecard service to help small and mid-sized businesses determine the right outsourcing vendor for their needs. Its on-demand software product, Lighthouse, is designed to help sma...

Earlier this month, Aprimo released Marketing 7.5, a milestone for the company in many respects. It is the first release that incorporates Ensemble, a product acquired from DoubleClick, and it provides business-to-consumer campaign management capability for the first time. Marketing 7.5 is also the ...

Earlier this week, RightNow Technologies announced its acquisition of Salesnet, an on-demand vendor known for its highly specialized sales methodologies. It was a coup for the Bozeman, Mont.-based vendor, says founder and CEO Greg Gianforte, for a number of reasons -- not least because it lopped a y...

Long known as a technology and hardware provider, Unisys has pushed to diversify, joining the ranks of large systems integrators just when many companies are drawn to the simple, low-risk offerings of hosted solutions providers. Unisys, however, sees that trend as temporary, and its CRM leaders feel...

In 1997, Keith Raffel founded UpShot Corporation, the first company to offer Web-based, hosted sales-force automation and CRM. UpShot launched its initial product two years later. By 2003 its products included UpShot for small and midsize businesses and UpShot XE for larger organizations. Today Raff...

Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow Technologies is a major player in the on-demand CRM space. In an interview with CRM Buyer, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte explained that unlike hosted CRM leader salesforce.com, which has its roots in sales force automation, RightNow focuses primarily on customer service...