Archive

There's an oft-heard slight in professional realms: "Those who can't do, teach." If taken seriously, this notion would leave marketers lost in their attempts to build consumer loyalty. Loyalty-building efforts are far-reaching and far-roaming, having scaled a precipice of marketing interest in the l...

I got a call from a friend the other day lamenting the loss of technical IT jobs to lower cost economies. I know this is a charged subject, but I thought I would wade into it to explore what it means for CRM. First off, I am not sure I agree with the point that many people make that exporting jobs ...

eGain Communications has released the latest iteration of its self-service application, eGain Service 7.6. New features include guidance on complex customer interactions and tweaks to security, as well as additional process improvement. Such incremental gains in functionality -- across the self-serv...

So your small business is experiencing better-than-expected growth, and you're ready to take the next step and expand globally? Think about when you go shopping -- more often than not, you may notice phrases like "Made in Mexico," "Made in Sri Lanka" or "Made in Italy." Perhaps they're on your cloth...

NetSuite has introduced a new development platform that gives both users and partners deeper customization capabilities for their respective needs. Called "SuiteFlex," the platform gives customers the tools to build their own workflows and user interfaces -- for example, a billing application that r...

Digital dashboards for the corporate world usually employ the typical "green light, yellow light, red light" motif, giving you an at-a-glance view of the company's bottom line (except, of course, for the color-blind -- like myself). However, the Holy Grail for metric gazers is not where the busines...

Renault is marketing a car called the Logan -- a starter vehicle that retails for about US$6,300. A safety conscious consumer may pause before getting in -- but he shouldn't, or at least not more so than he would with any other car. Renault is not cutting corners in its manufacturing process. Instea...

You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World, the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco re...

Oracle and IBM are leveraging the multi-million dollar investments they have made in their Linux product lines by joining forces to collaborate on the sales and marketing of Oracle applications for Linux on System z. This collaborative effort has been driven in large part by customer demand, Frank ...

A survey of online banking illustrates how banks can cement brand loyalty and even increase market share through a thoughtful redesign of their online channel. The survey was one of three extensive research studies released by Keynote Competitive Research, measuring the performance and competitive ...

What should companies do -- and what should they refrain from doing -- when reacting to blog postings about their products or services? Robert Cox, president of the New York-based Media Bloggers Association and a consultant to consumer packaged goods companies, has very specific ideas on the subject...

Oracle is offering to support clients' PeopleSoft and Siebel applications in its own data center -- a managed service option that it has offered with its own Oracle applications for the last few years. Oracle is including these new offerings in its On Demand portfolio, although the name is confusin...

At its first CRM customer summit, held this week in San Diego, Microsoft announced the availability of tools to integrate its Dynamics CRM application with competing ERP back-end systems. Called "Solution Accelerators," the integration packages connect via BizTalk Server. They are available for Orac...

Of all the CRM subsector technologies, sales force automation is the most mature. Expecting dramatic change in this category, therefore, would be akin to expecting the radical realignment of a general accounting ledger package. Yet, over the last year or so, dramatic change is exactly what has oc...

I keep thinking about the idea of this incubator that Salesforce.com is launching. As you know, I am a student of inflection points and I think the incubator potentially represents a very big one. There is a popular trend in economics to look at economic systems on the same plane as living ecosyste...