Archive

Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- and more recently, Aug. 29, 2005 -- disaster recovery has moved to the forefront of executive minds in corporate America. Terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes have prompted reviews of data storage practices, customer care locations and tech support. "Busin...

There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however. The big announcement was A...

Growth in the enterprise resource planning market may have paused during the 2001-2002 recession, but it is now back to a steady pace, according to a new AMR Research report. The consulting firm found that total ERP market revenue grew to more than US$25 billion in 2005 due to strong customer demand...

CRM captures transactional data collected through proprietary payment tools and point-of-sale software. Now retailers are marrying the "what" of behavioral data to the "why" of attitudinal data. "They know what's happening and the emotional triggers behind the activity," says marketing consultant M...

A lot of people will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for Salesforce.com's annual user meeting, Dreamforce. I think I have been to every one of these events and this year marks a turning point. Previous meetings have been held in local hotels and other venues around the cit...

Salesforce.com has opened its code to outside developers for the first time with the introduction of Apex, a new multi-tenant programming language and platform. Companies will be able to use Apex to tailor or reprogram their Salesforce.com deployments or build entirely new components within the appl...

In considering whether or how to reorganize customer service and back-office functions offshore, the option to open a captive subsidiary service center may not receive full consideration in comparison to outsourcing options. Here we look at the case for Western companies to establish their own dedi...

Oracle's Fusion -- its middleware designed to help customers use the various enterprise suites and applications it has acquired over the last few years -- has been incorporated into PeopleSoft Financial Management 9, the first new release of the application in eighteen months. "The application has a...

As a rule, manufacturers have been blissfully unconcerned with some of the finer points of CRM functionality and processes -- but not because they have been indifferent to their customers' needs. Rather, the low adoption rates of CRM technology in this sector have been more reflective of manufacture...

Salesforce.com is the proverbial face that launched a thousand ships. The company is largely -- and deservedly -- credited with ushering the software-as-a-service movement into the 21st century and lifting CRM out of the doldrums that plagued companies such as Siebel Systems in the late '90s. The r...

Witness Systems is making its first vertical play with the dual acquisitions of Demos Solutions Consulting Group and Exametric, two companies that provide workforce optimization, productivity and enterprise planning applications for the financial services industry. The aggregate purchase price for t...

I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certain...

Microsoft and EMC have developed native integration technology for SharePoint Server 2007, as well as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and SQL Server 2005, through a newly announced enterprise content management alliance. The new functionality expands the EMC options available to SharePoint users, E...

NetSuite has married two of its applications to provide additional features for clients that use its product to collaborate with partners. PRM+ integrates the company's partner relationship management, order management and commission management apps, incorporating enhanced functionality. It allows c...

You'd be hard pressed to find many traveling salespeople today who don't rely on their BlackBerry, PDA, cell phone or laptop to support their daily activities. So why does software directed at salespeople completely ignore their day-to-day selling lives? The software industry has done an admirable j...