Archive

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...

Clara Shih is a friend I met through Salesforce.com. She recently published "The Facebook Era," which looks at the relationship of social networking to front office computing. She is really busy these days promoting the book, and she recently left Salesforce to pursue new ideas in social networkin...

With consumers' inboxes perpetually filled with clutter, marketers are challenged to find new ways to break through with valuable, targeted messages that their customers actually want to open. The secret could lie in a largely untapped vehicle: transactional emails. The historical open rates of tra...

Business Intelligence has evolved considerably in the last several years. At one time the domain of PhDs or other highly trained employees, it has become accessible to the masses. Indeed, one of the competitive differentiators among the vendors in the market -- from the huge stack players to the sma...

Fidelitone Logistics works with large retailers to manage their inventories and ship consumer goods worldwide. Mike Schoenfeld, an executive VP at Fidelitone, recently gave a group of executives from a venture capital firm a tour of the company's operations. No, the VC model hasn't changed so radica...

Avaya is redoubling its efforts to gain traction in the mid-market, a neglected but potentially very lucrative niche for contact center providers. To that end, Avaya has acquired Agile Software, the company from which it had been OEM-ing its main mid-market solution, Avaya Contact Center Express. Wi...

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level. I was there and got a sense of change happening. It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the im...

RFID has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride. It started with a bang a few years ago, when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense issued their edicts that all suppliers would need to get on the RFID bandwagon within a set time frame. Well, that deadline has come and gone, and uptake has fallen we...

It may be as sexy as grandma's underpants, but data is the foundation upon which everything else is layered. Without the right support underneath, the fat will roll over your margins, creating an unsightly, unseemly, unprofitable business bulge. "While it sounds a little boring, managing data as the...

Recent developments in robotics are promising to reshape supply chain fundamentals. Specifically, robotic devices are improving warehouse operations to a degree unforeseen only a short while ago, by automating a slew of repetitive, difficult and usually monotonous tasks. Applying this technology t...

Today's column is a little different from the usual fare. Beagle Research Group has once again recognized a handful of companies with its annual WizKids award, this time for their innovations in front office computing. The idea behind the award -- and a report that goes with it -- is that innovati...

Zappos, online shoe emporium extraordinaire, has been expanding its line of merchandise in recent years -- offering clothes, watches and other jewelry, and even housewares. For the consumer, the shift has appeared effortless -- just more categories to explore on the Web site. Behind the scenes, thou...

Consona offers a line of enterprise resource management and customer relationship management software that is made up of parts that are more recognizable than the whole. Remember Onyx? It belongs to Consona. Same with Knova and, more recently, SupportSoft. Over the last few years, Consona has been s...

The term "marketing automation" is perhaps one of the most widely used, ill-defined and ambiguous terms in the marketing and sales technology landscape. Ask 10 different people how they define marketing automation, and you'll probably get 10 different answers. Are there marketing automation solutio...

I was surprised by the mini-storm that blew up over Salesforce's apparent decision to charge ISVs, SIs and other types of developers for support using their development environment. Two primary arguments have cropped up -- one that support ought to be free, and the other that it's hard to make mone...