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SugarCRM made enhancements in four areas in the Sugar 6 Spring 2011 release: CRM made global, CRM made mobile, CRM made social, and Sugar as a platform. SugarCRM will also work more on integration with IBM's Lotus family of products. Its acquisition of iExtensions could move its Lotus integration ro...

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer car...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of o...

A new breed of consumer has emerged. This new breed -- the social consumer -- is more connected, more vocal and has greater control. Social consumers use social media to voice their praises about a particular business, but they use social media just as frequently to voice their concerns and anger a...

Configure/Price/Quote tools provide companies technology-enabled processes by which selling organizations manage their opportunity-to-order methodology with automated tools that impact the speed and accuracy of developing quotes, proposals, contracts and products. As sales organizations endeavor to ...

Recently, a customer was using the Navy Federal Credit Union ATM and encountered some difficulty with his account. He whipped out his mobile device and tweeted to the world that he was having problems. You can probably guess what happened next: He received a return tweet shortly afterward. However, ...

The online shopping cart has become as much of a wish list as anything, giving consumers a place to store, compare, consider and dream about potential purchases. E-tailers, however, would like to see those potential purchases become actual ones, and they're coming up with increasingly sophisticated ...

Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other onli...

Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recentl...

Gulf Cooperation Council banks have begun to feel the heat of competitive pressure from foreign banks that are trying to exploit the potential investment prospects in this market by riding on their vast experience and proven consumer-friendly services. In such a scenario, the banks have nothing to ...

Over the past few years, we have seen a seismic shift in the relationship between sellers and consumers, with the power shifting to the consumer. Customers have always wanted exactly what they want, when they want it, at a great price. With today's technology, however, they have near total control...

With the continued emergence of new technology and channels including social media, mobile, avatars and more, the relationship between brands and their customers and prospects has been changed forever. It's interesting to consider the role of technology in these increasingly dynamic relationships. ...

As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don't have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses -- mostly small -- are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the...

I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day, and while I don't usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I've been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven't thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as...

Last week, at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco, the tech industry waited with bated breath for HP CEO Leo Apotheker's first presentation as CEO. Surely, the theory went, he would make a startling pronouncement describing a twist in the company's strategy -- say, a greater focus on developing its ...