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Customers experience a major difference in doing business with companies with strategies in place for synchronizing demand. Many studies are available of the top-performing companies that have achieved high levels of performance in this area.

Two years ago or so, a handful of upstart companies entered the CRM market offering open source technologies designed specifically for this space. At the time, open source CRM was neither mature nor relevant enough to corporate deployment needs to make much of a dent in the CRM space. Fast forward t...

CDC has made another proposal to buy Onyx following its failed attempt in January. At the same time, it announced plans to form a new company to manage the various enterprise applications under the corporate umbrella. While the corporate restructuring is not directly related to its new offer for Ony...

I was doing research for a white paper not long ago and it gave me reason to speak with people who operate call centers. The call center operators I spoke with had one thing in common; they used on-demand call center services. If you are not familiar with on-demand call center services, it's much ...

Amdocs continues to leverage its telephony roots to expand into retail banking, introducing three vertical applications for the financial services market under an approach called Dynamic Banking. The new products are Dynamic Pricing and Product Bundling, Customer Communications, and Mobile and Micro...

Microsoft is formalizing a trend that has been front and center in the CRM arena for years; the integrated suite approach to customer service is already a staple of most enterprise applications. Now, though, it has trickled down to the mid-market and even small business spaces. Last week, with much ...

More than 200 former PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and Retek customers have moved to SAP via its Safe Passage program since its introduction January 2005. The program was set up to entice companies worried about the uncertainties associated with Oracle's acquisition of their main enterprise applica...

"In terms of new VoIP products, this is definitely the year of the small business," John Macario, president of Savatar, told CRM Buyer. Macario has attended several VON Conference and Expos -- the voice-data industry's primary trade show -- over the years. At this year's show, now drawing to a close...

They are everywhere -- value propositions that claim much and deliver little. The fact that so many value propositions these days are of the "boil the ocean" variety makes some thoughtful people wonder if their view of the world is overly simplistic or if they are missing something. Sure, a list...

Lawson Software has bundled IBM's tech stack in the latest version of its enterprise resource planning suite, Release 9, for the first time since the firm announced a partnership with Big Blue last year. Lawson also announced that it expects next month to close its acquisition of the Swedish softwar...

Originally positioned as a small company application, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is clearly gunning for the enterprise with its latest release, rolled out in December. The company announced Tuesday that it has made additional inroads into that end of the market, citing customer wins including H&R Bl...

Continuing to develop its verticalization strategy, NetSuite has launched "NetSuite Software Company Edition," an application for the software industry. Not surprisingly, its design was based in part on NetSuite's own experiences, the company said. "Running a software company is complex -- especiall...

Enterprises that have already invested in contact center equipment may think managed services have nothing to offer them, but much of the managed services functionality offered today works in tandem with the Customer Premise Equipment already in place, enhancing features already in use. Advances in ...

In a world where customer acquisition costs are soaring and customer retention -- particularly retaining profitable ones -- is getting harder for every enterprise, "knowing your customer" is not just a slogan but a business mandate. However, in order to truly know its customers, an enterprise need...

Verizon Business is targeting the small to mid-sized market with the introduction this month of IP Web Center, a hosted contact center application. It is providing this functionality by adding Internet protocol capability to its Verizon Web Center service. This means that Verizon Web Center and Veri...