Archive

Traditionally, the contact center has been a cost center. However, with the contact center transforming into a profit center, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the center to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer sati...

SAP will offer new business process and rules management capabilities for its NetWeaver service-oriented architecture platform. NetWeaver Business Process Management and NetWeaver Business Rules Management will allow companies to build or change business processes and rules without coding. "Industry...

I have been investigating the possibility that social networking is something that can be used inside an organization -- "intra-organizationally," as my bureaucratic friends might say. That should really be no surprise -- the entire employee base is a natural community. There's at least one place,...

SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications. The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the ad...

Who would have thought the meltdown in financial services could fuel the overhaul of the industry's customer service departments? Actually, it's just one of several factors driving companies to put customer service initiatives on the fast track in pursuit of compelling business advantage. The subpri...

SAP and Research In Motion are partnering to develop a mobile CRM application. The first output of this venture will be a native BlackBerry smartphone client that links SAP CRM with BlackBerry applications such as Email, Address Book and Calendar. To be precise, they are developing a native RIM clie...

SugarCRM has released version 5.1 of its open source CRM platform, building on functionality it debuted in last year's milestone 5.0 release, which included new development tools, a new Ajax e-mail client, and a new multi-instance on-demand architecture. Among the new features in version 5.1 are enh...

Pharmaceutical companies manage large quantities of content about their product lines. However, unlike other industries, the challenge of managing this information is exacerbated by regulatory and compliance demands and the need to manage information from multiple "touch points" across a diverse cus...

This is one of my favorite times of year because it's announcement season, the time when all sorts of vendors book briefings to tell me about what's new in their worlds. It has been a busy couple of weeks, and I expect the briefing deluge to continue for the rest of the quarter. I love this because ...

The customer relationship management industry will grow by 14.2 percent this year, Gartner forecasts in a new report, with revenue expected to surpass $8.9 billion. Last year, the CRM industry registered $7.8 billion in global sales, based on preliminary revenue figures. The market is expected to co...

Combining in-memory data management, visual analytics, social networking and rich Internet applications, Software as a Service and open source software development, companies such as Advizor Solutions, Fractal Edge, Greenplum, LucidEra and others are filling what was an open niche in the BI marketpl...

Look closely at any effective customer relationship management strategy. Look beyond the technology, beyond the hype, and what will you see? What you'll see is a company that knows how to effectively communicate with its customers. Ask yourself, "What do CRM solutions actually do?" To put it very si...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

With the rapid advance of Software as a Service offerings, data warehouse or business intelligence appliances, and BI capabilities embedded within enterprise applications, companies are now faced with a variety of new deployment options for BI. Traditional on-premise software installations still pre...

Law firms stand to gain as much as anyone from the advances being made when it comes to CRM systems, and CRM software providers are keen to fill this potentially lucrative market niche. LexisNexis, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are among the firms out there offering CRM systems specifically geared fo...