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It is has been a roller-coaster year for E2open CEO Mark Woodward, mainly because that is how long he has been at the helm of the Software as a Service provider of supply-and-demand chain, procurement, and B2B integration applications. Over the past twelve months at E2open, the erstwhile senior advi...

It's been four months since Google announced it would guarantee 99.9 percent system accessibility for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based productivity suite of business-oriented messaging and collaboration apps, including integration capabilities and support. At the time, it se...

In this age of hype and hysteria, nearly every IT product peddled comes with the dire warning "if you do not buy, you die." On a few occasions, however, that claim proves true in the biggest, most unmistakable ways. "It can easily be argued that our current world economic crisis can be partially bla...

There are dozens of webinars, seminars, research reports, whitepapers, and blog postings on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Despite the endless flow of resources and suggestions, sales and marketing alignment continues to elude many organizations. Misalignment is often a byproduct of a...

Kudos to all those who participated in, organized or even attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in drizzly Boston last week. There is a lot to write about. The big ideas that I took away include disruption and evolution, ROI and a need to sharpen our focus. Here are a few thoughts on a very good sh...

Companies used to turn to outsourcing during tough financial times. The current global recession, however, has curtailed outsourcing as much as it has other parts of the economy. "Oddly enough, the global recession has hurt outsourcing significantly," said Chad Hahn, principal owner of Hahn Consulti...

The universe of enterprise resource planning providers is huge; ditto for open source. The space where twain meet? Not so much. xTuple is an open source ERP provider, and CEO Ned Lilly says there are few fellow travelers on his company's path. In this tanking economy, the company has been leveraging...

When e-commerce was born some 13 years ago, systems were typically proprietary, requiring a large team of internal developers to constantly upgrade features while diligently working to integrate them into key legacy back-office systems. At times, these were near-impossible tasks that consumed vast a...

This article draws on two discrete data sets: BI deployments of over 270 respondents in an Aberdeen Group April 2009 benchmark report; and the telecom lifecycle management solutions of 140 respondents in a March 2009 benchmark report. This data will be used to contextualize the value of integrated b...

Events taking place on the streets of Tehran may have an important effect on how social networking rolls out across the rest of the world, and that includes the CRM world. Last week, the media began carrying stories about a "cyber revolution" that may be happening in the Islamic Republic, but those ...

"You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!" -- "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" It seems painfully obvious now, but to the characters in Reese's famous candy commercials of the 1970s and 1980s, chocolate and peanut butter do actually go together quite well. In fact, what the initially...

Cloud computing is remaking just about every software category -- and project management is no exception. In the on-premise software era, collaboration was limited by the technology of a particular firm, as well as the security requirements of a particular industry. That was then, of course. Now, cl...

IT and business management are increasingly expressing alarm at rising costs associated with business intelligence implementations. The fear of hidden costs has kept many companies from making an investment, and many adopters have found that the costs related to ongoing support and maintenance of an...

What do these things have in common? Maybe nothing other than that the movie has a sequel and the two-dot-oh suffix is a sequel. Also, the start of blockbuster movie sequel season overlaps with trade shows like Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Sales 2.0 was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago, Enter...

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in. Enter Marketo, a startup whose raison d'etre is to get people to buy. Surprisingly -- or not, given its product lineup -- Marketo is d...