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"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surpr...

Peak oil: When planet Earth reaches the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. Some say it has already happened, some believe it will within the next 50 years, and some deny the possibility all together. By any measure, though, it is ...

There is a near-universal desire among firms to link all aspects of their supply chain -- including the customer front end -- on one platform. However, there are relatively few applications on the market today that address that demand. ModusLink hopes to fill that void with its newly launched e-busi...

Gartner's CRM conference is always a big event for the industry. The 2008 gathering, which just wrapped, was no different, with attendees leaving the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Oxon Hill, Md., in a thoughtful mood over the direction CRM is heading. Not surprisingly, there was a...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social netw...

In some respects, the market for Web-based applications resembles a crowded, noisy and confused bazaar. It's difficult to get a good wide-angle view of all available options. Those there to sell wares often have a hard time finding and securing the best place to set up shop, and those shopping for t...

In version 7.5, SalesLogix' latest product release, the company builds on the Web architecture and platform it introduced more than a year ago. For version 7.2, which debuted in spring 2007, SalesLogix rebuilt its architecture using standards-based, scalable Web technologies that set the stage for t...

When one company is ousted from the S&P 500 index, another one is added to keep the number at 500. The most recent losers in this game of musical chairs are, for obvious reasons, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Effective Sept. 12, these mortgage giants will be replaced by Fastenal and Salesforce.com...

In what could best be termed a photo finish, Greenplum and Aster Data Systems have both announced that they have integrated MapReduce into their massively parallel processing database engines. MapReduce, pioneered by Google for analyzing the Web, now becomes available to enterprises and service prov...

Four months out of the gate, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has been updated with Web 2.0 functionality to support Internet marketing campaigns, as well as other activities. The new features allow users to create and manage online and search engine campaigns; research and bid on keywords using search...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting par...

Sprint Nextel is making a big push to help customers understand their phones, creating a formal program to make store employees available to explain their products and set them up for buyers. The campaign to be announced Tuesday is the first official program for in-person help by a cell carrier, but...

CRM users have been waiting for a viable mobile CRM market ecosystem to develop for years. To be sure, the industry tantalizes users with news that this or that vendor or offering or solution will herald mainstream application of this technology. For the most part, though, it hasn't happened yet, sa...

Many contact centers continue to operate at suboptimal levels. Case in point: One financial services company has managed to turn "press zero to talk to a human" into not just a selling point but a major advertising campaign. While some great leaps in efficiency and quality have been made over the pa...

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about t...