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Competing for customers has never been more challenging, intensely focused or costly for manufacturers globally. Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product line extensions to marginally increase a given product's market size and potential sales, manufacturers must get bac...

Salesforce.com has introduced a set of new tools with a pricing model designed to encourage adoption of its Force.com Platform as a Service product introduced last year. One of the new entries is Force.com Cloud Computing architecture, which can be purchased on a per-login basis. "The concept of clo...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specif...

B2B integration provider Extol International has introduced a middleware application aimed at the upper midmarket. Business Extenders, a subset of its main product line, Extol Business Integrator, is designed to address one-off pain points in the IT environment: a sales manager's inability to see th...

Three months after BEA Systems rejected its first unsolicited offer of $6.7 billion, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring the middleware and business process management vendor after all -- for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share. That's a 14 percent premium over its first bid and a 24 percent pr...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just mu...

CRM is all about the front office and those processes that affect or touch the customer. After 15-plus years of software development aimed at this space, you might think that there's nothing left to be said -- or, more precisely, done. You'd be wrong. Dick Lee, principal of High-Yield Methods and w...

Companies' integrated voice recognition applications are being stretched thinner and thinner. Even with the best interface designs in place, customers are still abandoning calls before completion. Forty-three percent of companies surveyed in the Aberdeen Contact Center Analytics benchmark report are...

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform. The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data m...

Software as a Service was designed to be a more convenient way for businesses to implement enterprise applications. However, on the vendor side, the new distribution approach complicates matters in the sales department. Traditionally, a salesperson would sell clients on-premise software packages tha...

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers. I got to thinking about this after watching the movie "Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finc...

Analyzing data from more than 170 survey respondents from various global organizations, Aberdeen highlights how Best-in-Class organizations are instituting well-defined service level agreements as part of a holistic approach to their BPO initiative not only to decrease expenses, but also to realize ...

I own an iPod. Do you? If so, do we have anything in common? Apple is hoping that we do, and it's providing plenty of room for us to find out at the iTunes Store. There, music lovers can write and read reviews of artists' recent, and not-so-recent, releases. Perhaps more commercially important, they...

B. Joseph Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time. Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre &...

On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog. "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you s...