Archive

Sage Software this week purchased financial services compliance and document tracking technology from VerticalFalls, in order to expand Sage's ACT product family. This is the second vertical market that ACT has targeted; earlier this year, the company released ACT for Real Estate. The new acquisitio...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...

Witness Systems announced Monday that it has acquired Amae Software, which will add customer feedback capabilities to Witness' contact center offering. The Amae application is a Web-based system that can survey across any communications channel or customer contact. It can link survey results and cus...

I have always advocated that CRM is a growing field, and that it grows at the margins whenever some innovative company introduces a new application type. As such, the definition really speaks more about all of the front office than CRM alone. Nevertheless, over the last few years we've seen a lot ...

Sales executives have long embraced the vision of leveraging incentive compensation to drive performance within their sales teams. In this vision commissions are the reward, the proverbial carrot used to motivate reps to achieve and exceed specific revenue and performance metrics. However, the gap b...

Demographic information is the most common type of information gathered from your customers, and today ranges from basic information such as name and address to age, education, profession, hobbies, pets, and virtually any type of factual attribute. The more you know about your customers' profiles, t...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures gam...

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems. Features include ConnectOut, an on-demand outbound messaging application program interface; ConnectOracle, which integrate...

Perhaps a savvy political operative tasked with designing the best go-to-market campaign for service-oriented architecture would proclaim: "It's the applications, stupid!" Focusing on the applications -- and not the means to achieving them -- has served computing well over the decades. I recall tryi...

No longer having to hear that "CRM is dead" is one thing to be thankful for, says Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. That was a talking point making the rounds a few years back, and it developed sudden and significant traction when it was echoed by an executive of one of the lea...

You have to take your hat off to Salesforce.com, I think. Last week's earnings call was a thing of beauty. It was the kind of thing that I bet every entrepreneur must dream of doing someday -- reporting to the investors on a great quarter for their newly public company. It wasn't so long ago that...

When the Internet burst upon the scene in the early 1990s, the concept of software as a service seemed an idea whose time had come. It got hyped along with everything else about the Internet and reached a massive peak of inflated expectations in early 2000, as venture capitalists funded dozens of ne...

Siebel reportedly settled a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of its software engineers for US$27.5 million. The software maker was accused of violating overtime laws between 2000 and 2005. Approximately 800 employees who worked for Siebel will be receiving on average of $27,000 each, assuming th...

There is little dispute that Software as a Service model rapidly becoming a dominant delivery model. By 2009, more than 50 percent of new implementations of sales force automation applications will be SaaS deployments, according to a new Gartner research note. Not surprisingly, the popularity of th...