Archive

Software as a Service pioneer Salesforce.com exceeded analyst expectations for its second quarter, registering net income of $3.74 million -- a 3 cent per share increase -- and revenue of $176.6 million. The Street had been expecting it to bring in just $174 million in sales. Total revenue for the q...

From all indications, the Software as a Service model of developing and distributing applications is gaining traction and is poised for a phase of rapid growth, whether it be in small and medium-sized businesses or large-scale enterprises. Estimated worldwide revenue for on-demand CRM applications i...

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum. It's hard to believe th...

Google may be No. 1 in terms of overall usage of its search engines. However, it appears to be falling short in one very important, non-tech metric: customer satisfaction. For the first time, Yahoo has overtaken Google to claim the top spot in this area, according to the University of Michigan's Ame...

IBM upgraded the functionality in its RFID technology tailored for the pharmaceutical industry that it introduced in December. The company's WebSphere RFID Information Center version 1.1 will now help pharma companies comply with the ePedigree laws going into effect in California and elsewhere. The ...

ReachForce, an on-demand provider of marketing databases, is making the jump into a related software niche. Last month, it made available on a limited basis Fountainhead, an on-demand marketing predictive campaign engine customized for the Salesforce.com portfolio of products. Next month, according ...

The demand for automated incentive compensation has brought it into the on-demand world. Implementing a world-class enterprise incentive management, or EIM, system is essential given today's fierce global competition, and as Software as a Service, or SaaS, gains momentum, more and more companies loo...

Companies are increasingly faced with the challenge of how to leverage the large amounts of data available in the contact center. The data is accumulated through customer management systems -- CRM, SFA, ERP and order fulfillment -- and interactions with the customer. Even though providing consistent...

The front office computing market continues to impress me despite the fact that I have been covering it for so long. Early solutions evolved into suites that covered what we once thought were all of the niches possible, but the surprising thing is that all that coverage simply initiates many new nic...

More than half of all consumers say a negative online experience leads to online and offline abandonment. With the click of a mouse, a customer who has invested time and effort researching your products and services online, and who may have purchased something from your site or store in the past, wi...

An Ottawa-based provider of CRM for small and medium-sized businesses, The Long Reach Corporation has a surprisingly far-flung customer base, with clients in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. That is likely due to the special niche it fills for SMBs, a corporate co...

StayinFront has shifted its CRM application to .Net architecture in what is the first major overhaul of its flagship product in two years. The new product, StayinFront CRM 10, migrated from a client-server model to a platform that allows it to integrate with other software applications more easily a...

Online fraud scams continue to grow by 15 percent per quarter, targeting financial institutions of all sizes as well as e-commerce venues. The direct cost to financial and e-commerce industries is significant -- estimated by some analysts in the billions of dollars in 2006 alone. The rock phish atta...

Genius.com has released Genius Team -- a new edition of SalesGenius, the marketing and sales application it debuted last year. The new team application automates many of the tasks in SalesGenius and provides a venue for greater administrative control, according to Felicity Wohltman, vice president o...

Oracle has released its latest semiannual upgrade of its Siebel CRM On Demand product. Unlike previous releases that focused on smaller changes and tweaks, Release 14 incorporates substantial improvements to its architecture and integration capabilities. In fact, it is the product's most significant...