Archive

LeadLife Solutions has released a second-generation marketing automation product that combines a Web 2.0 user interface with a visual campaign builder designed to make marketing automation easier for companies. The new solution provides an easy-to-use alternative to complex marketing automation offe...

SAP has updated SAP Business One, rolling out its 8.82 iteration for both the on-premises and hosted versions. A point release, the upgrade cannot be said to be a major leap forward in terms of functionality, but it does offer solid enhancements to the application's bread-and-butter feature set, as ...

I like the saying, "Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude toward us." It's a nice quote, although it was uttered by John N. Mitchell, a convicted prevaricator who participated in the Watergate conspiracy and ended up in an Alabama prison as a result. Paraphrase it for business and it m...

A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog j...

Bank of America has decided to back off from a controversial fee that it announced in September: a $5 ding every month for consumers who use their debit cards to make a retail purchase. The plan had endured sustained consumer outrage since it was publicly revealed. Bank of America, which did not ret...

The explosive adoption of the Internet has created a new kind of Web-savvy customer who expects a rich, efficient, personalized online user experience that's accessible 24/7 via any online access point -- Web, mobile device or social media -- and that provides consistent engagement across multiple ...

Salesforce.com has a developed a new tool for companies to help them develop and publish Web pages and landing pages specifically for marketing campaigns. The tool, called "Siteforce," is built on the Force.com platform. It focuses specifically on new technologies that legacy content management syst...

Fast, easy and accurate -- ask any consumer to describe good customer service and that is the likely response you'll receive. Traditionally, people have reached out to call centers, confident that a well-trained customer service representative would have the knowledge to fill in the blanks. But movi...

At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss?...

Microsoft is rolling out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for both the partner-hosted and on-premises deployments. The update includes its promised "Activity Feeds," as well as administrative enhancements and stepped-up disaster recovery practices. Microsoft has put Dynamics CRM on...

The ire exhibited by consumers in the wake of Bank of America's recent announcement that it would impose a $5 monthly fee for using debit cards for retail purchases does not seem to have been a momentary flash -- at least, not based on findings in a survey by The Research Intelligence Group. Thirty ...

Oracle has scooped up RightNow Technologies for a reported $1.5 billion. The acquisition price is a hefty 20 percent premium over RightNow's closing price last week. The acquisition fills a missing gap in Oracle's cloud-based CRM functionality. The deal also provides an excellent exit strategy for ...

Predixion Software has introduced Predixion Insight 2.0, the latest version of its collaborative predictive analytics solution. The new release includes enterprise collaboration features, interactive visualizations and automated workflow capabilities, as well as an on-premises version of its predict...

Marketo is taking aim at the smaller end of the business community with Spark, a stripped-down version of its revenue performance management application. The new offering is an entirely separate product; however, there is a tight migration path between it and other products in the Marketo family, sa...

As a CRM journalist, I always enjoy talking to integrators (or resellers, or VARS, or partners, or whatever term they choose to describe themselves). It's always an interesting contrast to speaking with vendors. The discussion you have with a vendor is like taking an anatomy course; the discussion y...