Archive

To get a sense of all the wonderfulness surrounding Convergence, you need only glance at some of the many observations made by the likes of Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Dennis Howlett, Josh Greenbaum and many others. So kudos to Microsoft. My observations will be somewhat different. While I also t...

Microsoft is stepping up its cloud strategy, with the announcement that it will port its Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning software to Windows Azure this year. The company outlined plans for the transition at Convergence 2012, held last week in Houston. Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics G...

Gmail sales productivity application Yesware does not align with any particular CRM vendor or industry or even sales methodology. That possibly accounts for its wide- ranging and especially large user base, said founder and CEO Matthew Bellows. In six months, Yesware has picked up 20,000 business us...

The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their jux...

If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present -- and the future -- and Jobs and Gates were only playing part...

M5 Networks has partnered with InsightSquared to create a solution that will allow customers to manage data generated from M5, along with data from other systems, in InsightSquared's business intelligence product. The solution will help customers manage data from their business phone system and othe...

Avaya is formalizing an outsourcing service it has been offering select clients for the past year. The service, Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions, manages all of a company's communications operations, regardless of age, location or vendor. It is part of the company's portfolio of Managed Se...

In the UK, supermarket chain Tesco is being pounded right now in social media channels because it's refusing to honor an erroneous online advertisement offering new iPads for about $65. The offer went viral, and now the backlash is viral, too. How Tesco responds will tell the tale. I'd recommend a s...

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the Infrastructure as a Service space. Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it c...

Yammer announced an impressive $85 million financing recently. You might already know that Yammer provides enterprise social networks, the kind of collaborative spaces that enable employees to "swarm" on issues to achieve resolution or deal with a customer issue, for instance. Yammer claims that mo...

The Columbus Blue Jackets are a team in the National Hockey League, which means their revenue stream thrives -- or dies -- on how well they can sell tickets. The team has an extensive and sophisticated sales operation that fields nearly 300 calls per day. However, the team wanted tech support for it...

A friend of mine bought a car that is, to be honest, a lot more than he really needs. It has all the bells and whistles, wrapped in a lovely paint job and a plush leather interior. Yet every time I ride in it, I discover something that he's overlooked. Yes, Randy -- this would be where you plug in y...

You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator -- with the exception of monthly recurring revenue that subscription companies measure -- it only tells you where you've been, ...

FirstRain, an analytics software company that provides personalized, real-time customer intelligence to sales and marketing professionals, has announced the launch of the first Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. The system delivers targeted customer, prospect and industry intelligence directly...

Bank of America appears poised to ignite the wrath of its customer base once again by introducing a new fee structure for basic checking accounts. The company reportedly is readying changes that will require users of basic checking accounts to pay a monthly fee. If the customers agreed to bank onlin...