Spotlight Features

The use of RFID technology in the retail industry has been increasing, albeit tentatively. Meanwhile, proponents are finding that RFID adoption is easier in the manufacturing sector and upstream in the supply chain, in areas such as asset tracking and inventory management, as well as security relate...

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 ...

2006 was a quiet year for buyers and sellers of enterprise applications. There were no startling leaps of new functionality; no dramatic bids for competing vendors; and no large plunge in revenues thus prompting vendors to give way at the negotiating table. The year wasn't as quiet for small and me...

I had meetings last week with each of the big three on-demand CRM vendors -- Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite -- and made some observations. Sometimes I get complaints from some of them when I mention more than one in an article because they like to pretend that they are unique. My grudging con...

In looking back at the last few years for the CRM industry, 2001 was the year Siebel reigned supreme; 2002 was the year the recession took hold and companies held off on new CRM and other IT investments; 2004 was the year of mergers and acquisitions; and 2005 was the year those firms that remained s...

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it. On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people wil...

As most people know now, the practice of pretexting was publicly highlighted earlier this year when it was revealed that HP had hired private detectives to spy on reporters whose reporting appeared to be based on leaks from members of its Board. The PIs has used pretexting ruses to gain access to th...

Like many industry analysts and alumni, I find analytical concepts sexy. Add in creating strategies for serving customers more efficiently while being profitable at it, and the conditions are perfect for the creation of an Accidental Analyst. The analytical side of CRM experienced explosive growth ...

Selling products and services through multiple channels offers a number of "touch points" where information can be gathered from customers or potential customers. Most people in marketing clearly understand the importance of using this information to personalize communications with customers and per...

Service centers get a lot more calls with complaints and criticisms than they get showers of praise. All telecom companies experience churn rates way above those of many other industries -- it isn't unheard of for 30 percent of an average telecom company's customers to switch providers in the course...

Technological development is fueling the transformation of economies and production processes around the world. Just-in-time manufacturing -- an industry-shaking innovation when Japanese manufacturers applied the methodology on a wholesale basis back in the early 1980s -- is now a best practice acro...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo, the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year. This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as t...

If you asked each member of your sales team what problem your company solves, what value you provide, and how you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, would their answers be clear, consistent and compelling? Most likely, you would receive a range of inconsistent responses. Today's salespe...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...