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When RightNow Technologies announced plans to acquire Salesnet, executives at Art Technology Group mulled over how the deal might impact them. In the first quarter, the company had launched two on-demand customer service applications -- ATG Answers OnDemand and ATG Customer Care OnDemand -- that co...

More and more of the companies that are either piloting or actively pursuing Service-Oriented Architecture frameworks to support their business strategies are aiming to accentuate, strengthen and streamline selling and service strategies. Cutting the costs surrounding database and data warehouse con...

Earlier this week, RightNow Technologies announced its acquisition of Salesnet, an on-demand vendor known for its highly specialized sales methodologies. It was a coup for the Bozeman, Mont.-based vendor, says founder and CEO Greg Gianforte, for a number of reasons -- not least because it lopped a y...

Salesforce.com has released an application that is expected to build out and bolster its nascent reseller channel. Called "AppExchange OEM Edition," it is an on-demand platform that independent software vendors can use to develop applications to sell without a separate contract from Salesforce.com. ...

Remember demand? It was always seen with supply and it was used to make markets until some wise guys told us that the two could go their separate ways. If you keep all things constant except for supply you can run the table, or so they said. It reminds me of the old joke about the poet, the engin...

A PricewaterhouseCoopers' Management Barometer survey has identified CRM as one of the top drivers of change management initiatives among multinationals today. The typical company is currently using an average of five change strategies to achieve desired benefits, it said. Leadership training, at 77...

RightNow Technologies announced it has acquired Salesnet, a provider of specialized, on-demand sales force automation (SFA) methodology, in an all-cash transaction for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition, which is being hailed as a smart move on the part of RightNow, will expand its customer base an...

Witness Systems has added new functionality to its Impact 360 Workforce Optimization application that it launched last year. Impact 360 is the application derived through combining Witness Systems' software with technology obtained in its Blue Pumpkin acquisition. In this release, Witness Systems ti...

A new report shows that government agencies are "reinventing" themselves with online customer service. The study indicates that the Internet is thus "redefining" the relationship between citizens and their governments, as government agencies around the world adopt digital applications, from allowing...

The recent run-up of gas prices has lead to many U.S. companies rethinking their stance on telecommuting, and in the more global context, the increasing acceptance of outsourcing is creating virtual teams at an unprecedented rate. Given the euphoria over Software-as-a-Service applications, the ques...

In a major leap for a company that only recently introduced the Software as a Service model, SAP announced it is combining its on-demand CRM application with its on-premise CRM suite in a new product it calls SAP CRM 2006s. "We are moving our entire CRM product [line] to the hybrid model," Angela Ba...

New data shows that job cut announcements in the tech sector are waning. Employers, though, hardly needed a research study to tell them that hiring has new challenges. Q1 2006 represented the fourth consecutive quarter in which tech-sector job cuts were below their year-prior levels, according to a ...

Onyx has upgraded its analytics application with the introduction of Onyx Analytics 3.0, a product within the vendor's Performance Management portfolio. New features in this release include scorecarding and event monitoring functionality. Scorecarding allows users to monitor and rate performance aga...

For decades Sage Software has focused on the mid-market and SMB space, selling a variety of accounting back office and CRM oriented front office applications around the world, but the company has always been something of an odd duck in the business software market. For starters, Sage has been throu...

Buying a U.S. company offers a quick and easy way to acquire a client base without having to build one up slowly through traditional sales and marketing efforts, efforts that can be expensive, time consuming and not always successful. As described in part one of this series, acquisitions can provi...