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The traditional sales pressures of lengthening sales cycles and low quota achievement have only been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn. Many businesses have been forced to cut costs, eliminate waste and often freeze spending. The few organizations that might be looking to spend are increas...

It is inevitable. In economics, commoditization is a routine part of the life cycle, the opposite end of the spectrum from innovation and as natural as life and death. Sometimes commoditization results in the elimination of a product or idea, but at other times it merely means subsuming the innovati...

Companies deploy CRM solutions to improve business performance, maximize customer relationships and enhance customer service, but many deployments fail to meet expectations. There are many reasons technology rollouts fail, from lack of planning to lack of funding, but there's another, less-understoo...

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

While most believe that knowledge is indeed power and that knowing where one stands at any given moment is valuable information, not all companies are eagerly queuing to buy into business intelligence. "We are increasingly finding that those companies that are putting BI solutions in place for gener...

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing ...

Two of the biggest names in CRM had trade shows recently. Oracle and Microsoft each held customer conventions in the same week, but the two could not have been more different. Microsoft attracted thousands of customers, partners, employees and press to New Orleans for Convergence, one of its big ann...

Oracle has acquired Relsys, a small private company that makes drug safety analytics software for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The terms of the deal were not revealed. Relsys will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which is expected to take place by this summer. O...

Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, a new social media application. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a free platform that lets people send out messages of no more than 140 characters to as broad a community as they can build. The posts, or "tweets," as they're known, can cover ...

Having joined the business software company in 1996, George Klaus, chairman, president and CEO of Epicor, is hardly a newbie by industry standards. However, he tells CRM Buyer that all of his executive team has been with the company even longer -- long enough, in other words, to have weathered sever...

Once upon a time, business was done smartly and logically. New initiatives were part of long-term plans and all new ideas had to pass muster. Then came a period where a whiff of a trend meant change for change's sake, which was followed by a period most notable for its greed-fest. Combined, these la...

Successfully leveraging an organization's collective knowledge has been an aspirational goal for decades, but many companies have deemed the effort as a "mission impossible" after investing time and money into these projects. Companies have built out information strategies that leveraged sprawling d...

Do you know what your people are working on? Do you know why your project is late? Do you know if you are getting the ROI you need? You may not realize it, but what you don't know can hurt you and your organization. You might be planning projects that your resources cannot accommodate, or spending t...

Although Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu doesn't describe his company as the Wal-Mart of the software world, he would likely find the comparison apt. Some vendors stand out from their peers because they were the first to commercialize a particular application; some because they were the most successful in ev...

Knowledge is power, but without context and imagination, it's just bytes of data, every bit as dark and useless as ignorance itself. "One bank CIO recently told me, 'We had the data, but we did not have the information,'" Boris Evelson, analyst at Forrester, told CRM Buyer in describing the banking ...