Archive

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 ...

Consumers face a staggering number of online choices. This reality comes as a burden to e-commerce companies that watch more than 95 percent of visitors leave before making a purchase, despite all the money spent on SEO, search and other customer acquisition tactics. While once a niche tactic, reta...

Oracle CRM On Demand for Partner Relationship Management has integrated a social application that gives users a sense of what customers, partners and employees are saying about a particular sale or activity or client -- and in an orderly fashion. The challenge Accept360 addresses with its applicatio...

In a time of economic turmoil, business intelligence (BI) initiatives stand out for their potential to improve corporate performance through better use of data gathering by disparate systems. Compared with many enterprise IT projects, BI requires relatively modest investments. One of the most import...

On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies, but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times. As a social learning...

In June and August of 2010, Aberdeen surveyed more than 453 executives regarding their 2011 Marketing Executive's Agenda. The results regarding their most significant challenges were compelling: 61 percent of all companies stated that the difficult economic environment was the top pressure facing th...

Sage offers companies a choice of CRM options for sales automation, including Sage ACT, Sage CRM, and SalesLogix. The company currently has about 3.6 million users and serves about 80,000 businesses. "Sage has a portfolio of CRM solutions," said Joe Bergera, executive vice president and general mana...

It was only a matter of time before Mellmo, developer of the Roambi ES3 mobile business intelligence application, got around to integrating it with SAS BI. Now that it has, however, Santiago Becerra, chairman and cofounder of Mellmo, told CRM Buyer that the wait was worthwhile. "This is our tight...

Around the time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and signed into law, I was a reporter covering that area of technology. Specifically, I was writing about service, measurement, data management and the software that made all that possible for telecommunications companies. Little did I re...

One of the more revealing things I heard from Marc Benioff at Cloudforce 2011 in New York last week was his idea about how his company will continue to build out its product line. Marc's never been super secretive about his general direction, though product specifics have always been closely kept. ...

As tasks continue to pile up in my already hectic schedule, I have little choice but to jam more and more activities into the same crowded time spans. The morning commute, a once luxurious gap in time, seems to be increasingly plugged by business calls, urgent text messages and, in some cases, even ...

With an option for open source development, SugarCRM offers a sales automation system that encompasses pipeline management, social CRM, and the entire lead-to-cash process. "The SugarCRM core sales automation functionality includes lead capture and lead distribution, opportunity and account manageme...

Adobe recently introduced version 5.4 of its Web Experience Management application, a collection of content and campaign management tools with mobile, social media and multichannel capabilities. It also offers tighter integration with Adobe Online Marketing Suite. The suite is based on the CQ5 conte...

One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps you understand how to keep them coming back. Still, there's a long way f...