Archive

FrontRange has acquired Enteo, a privately held Germany-based company, at undisclosed terms. The firm's product offerings include applications for patch management, distribution of operating systems and applications, license management and compliance, and configuration management. It has 1,200 custo...

Do you want revolutionary improvements in IT quality and speed-to-solution with dramatic reductions in cost? Consider an organization-wide Web services delivery strategy. Today, businesses demand three key outcomes from IT: delivering faster technology solutions to a growing group of stakeholders; r...

Over the last three weeks I have received an intensive course in what it means to be The Customer, and I really liked it. During that time -- not to mention the preceding six months -- my wife and I have been trying to get our kitchen remodeled. In our journey we have dealt with a broad range of co...

Without a doubt, adoption and use of radio frequency identification accelerated dramatically when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense gave their respective suppliers marching orders to implement the technology. However, suppliers for the most part were not happy with the additional costs and reso...

Microsoft is introducing a number of productivity tools to its Dynamics product line that should extend ERP functionality and data throughout the enterprise using the familiar user interface and productivity tools in the Microsoft Office system. This release -- specifically a licensing package of Mi...

The movement to Internet protocol-based phone systems and contact centers is in full swing. This is great news for smaller businesses, since standards-based IP networks offer far more flexibility and capabilities for much lower costs than their TDM predecessors. As a bonus, the protocol that runs th...

There's no other series of business processes that are going through more of a transformation today and impacting customer relationships more than order management. These series of processes have gone through multiple owners, first starting with IT who adopted them as a quick way to achieve ERP syst...

No call should strike more fear into the heart of an online business than a call from a customer saying, "Your site won't let me do what I want to do." Chilling words, because only a tiny percentage of online consumers will actually pick up the phone to alert businesses to a problem. By the time tha...

SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, is expanding its reach to Europe -- an essential step for any small, high growth software company more than a few years old. The company is opening its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Company cofounder Clint Oram will be the gene...

Business intelligence is a fast-growing segment area in the on-demand market. BI solutions help enterprises track performance, understand business drivers, and manage an organization's overall operations. "BI is a large, complex set of technologies, processes and methodologies that address all of th...

Every disruptive innovation requires a minimum of two parties to play the game. There has to be a disruptor -- someone who does the disrupting -- as well as one or more disruptees -- the party or parties being disrupted. Identifying either party is difficult, but for different reasons. The disrupt...

It's not an easy task to summarize the makeup of today's customer in a singularly defined formula. Not only do customers' individual needs vary on a case-by-case basis, but as an aggregate whole, customers' needs are maturing and have become much more complex and demanding than prior generations. Re...

Avaya is moving further into the communications collaboration space with its latest tool, Communications Enabled Business Processes. The software-and-service combo offering embeds Avaya Intelligent Communications products into a business process -- such as a production line's crisis communications a...

Adoption and use of radio frequency identification accelerated dramatically when Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense gave their respective suppliers marching orders to implement the technology. However, suppliers for the most part were not happy with the extra costs and resources that had to be d...

When Oracle announced it had agreed to buy the business intelligence vendor Hyperion for $3.3 billion, executives did not waste time explaining one of its motives. "Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle's offerings to SAP customers," Oracle President Charles Phillips stated. "...