Archive

Oracle has gone to the debt markets to fund its $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems. The company has priced an offering in three series of investment-grade notes for a total of $5 billion. It is selling $1.25 billion of 4.95 percent notes due 2013; $2.5 billion of 5.75 percent notes due 2018; and $...

In recent years, First Call Resolution has emerged as a critical element for contact centers looking to become more customer centric. The FCR metric focuses on how well a contact center handles customer requests the first time, and most organizations agree that it is the only true metric that delive...

SAP has signaled its intention to hand the leadership reins to board member and deputy chief executive Leo Apotheker, naming him as co-CEO to serve alongside current chief Henning Kagermann, whose contract expires in 13 months. SAP has traditionally groomed its chief executives in this manner. Kager...

HP has released a number of new offerings targeting the mid-market, including new Linux management tools, remote security access products and -- for companies embarking on a customer relationship management implementation -- two new additions to the HP ProLiant server line that include configuration...

Active is much better than passive in most things, not just CRM. In writing, I am constantly reminded to write in the active voice because active voice is terse, to the point and more intelligible. Passive voice takes perfectly good sentences and turns them into gobbledygook. For example, the active...

A network intrusion at Advance Auto Parts has put the credit card, debit card and checking account information of up to 56,000 customers in jeopardy. Data security at 14 stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia and New York, has been compromised, according to the...

You would think, based on blogosphere chatter, that Starbucks invented Web 2.0. The company's introduction of My Starbucks Idea last month has inspired numerous bloggers -- some who make it their business to follow Web 2.0, some who could care less about the space -- to post about the new site. Basi...

SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and i...

Candidates, political parties and money might seem to dominate the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election, but when it comes to voter relationship management, software rules campaigns and politicking. When qualified U.S. citizens cast a legal ballot to express a preference for a candidate or for a...

Companies now have many options when it comes to packaged applications for CRM, and these applications are helping companies reduce development time, in some cases by as much as 65 percent, which in turn helps save money. These resources are now freed up to explore greater CRM customization that ult...

As an executive at Callidus Software, Chris Cabrera was frustrated at the mid-market deals he often had to leave at the wayside. There were firms that basically could not afford Callidus' on-premise incentive compensation software, nor the integration and implementation costs that would accompany su...

Every year, Beagle Research Group scours the tech landscape in search of a few good companies that are developing technologies not only novel to the customer relationship management industry, but also likely to reinvent business processes in their particular niches. Denis Pombriant, principal at the...

Sometime between Groundhog Day and the Final Four each year, we try to publish a short report that showcases some of the brightest emerging companies in front-office computing. We call it the "WizKids Report," and we present the companies in the report with a small award. At times, companies who ha...

Having your customers comment on your policies, products or employment practices is one thing. Having them suggest ideas for improving said policies and products -- in a public forum where participants can vote on these ideas, no less -- is an entirely different matter. How well a company can handl...

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but al...