Archive

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest...

Cisco Systems has introduced its Unified Communications system -- a new suite of voice, data and video products and applications based on the Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP standard. Cisco is no stranger to this open standard. Last year, for instance, it acquired Dynamicsoft, the company that o...

Salesforce.com has introduced its fourth suite -- Unlimited Edition -- to add to its product portfolio, which also includes Team Edition, Personal Edition and Enterprise Edition. Unlimited Edition, as the name suggests, offers a far larger capacity to store custom applications that users create or d...

Avtex, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner that offers contact center, IP telephony and unified messaging applications, will be moving into the hosted contact center VoIP space once its acquisition of Interactive Solutions International is completely absorbed. The company announced on Friday that it ...

Now is the time for all good dads to come to the aid of their Girl Scout daughters and sell, sell, sell cookies. What is reminiscent of the sentence used by many typing teachers to teach that skill has become the battle cry throughout the suburbs of America. What has quickly replaced the length of...

CRM may be the largest Software as a Service (SaaS) market, but it is by no means the only one. If current trends continue, it may well lag behind the new software sectors moving to adopt the SaaS model. One hot sector is compliance management, which is now the second largest SaaS market segment, ac...

For years, marketers have shuddered at the realization that consumers are on to them. They've worried about saturation, about people ingesting so many advertisements and marketing messages on an average day that no one has a chance at standing out. Marketers have created a whole lexicon around the p...

Talisma has released a new version of its Customer Interaction Management suite, Talisma CIM 7.0. The software integrates multiple communication channels, including e-mail, chat, Web self-service and phone. Able to handle million of interactions, Talisma 7.0 can be deployed on-site or on-demand. Thi...

I take between three and seven briefings each week from software companies. Some of these companies are known quantities that I like to keep up with, while others are new to me or possibly new to the world. Most times, companies are looking for an objective opinion on a plan, a message or an idea ...

Sage Software has introduced version 5.8 of its CRM application, an upgrade that includes new customization, data management and user administration functionality. Its marquee feature is the Dashboard, or user interface, Elaine Therrien, North American product manager for Sage CRM, told CRM Buyer. ...

The market has declared CRM dead any number of times over the years. The most recent pronouncement came when iconic Siebel was purchased by Oracle. If the market maker couldn't stay afloat, then what hope did other vendors have? To be sure, there is something to that doleful reasoning: Few expect th...

IBM is pushing its business partners to more heavily promote its software-as-a-service initiative by offering new sales and marketing incentives. Channel partners will receive a 10 percent referral fee for each lead that turns into a sale. IBM will also make its sales force more accessible to partne...

Small and medium-sized businesses -- empowered by the range of applications developed with them in mind over the last few years -- are getting more demanding about features and functionality, suggest two recent surveys. SMBs have come to prefer having one supplier of an integrated software applicati...

The growing adoption of service-oriented architectures including SAP's NetWeaver platform and its related applications are having a significant impact on the politics of integration between manufacturers and distributors. The balance of power has already shifted in a few industries to the channel o...

With the rollout of Microsoft CRM 3.0 now underway, expectations are running high that this is the version that will finally push Microsoft far into the small and medium-sized CRM vendors' turf. "This is the first time Microsoft CRM is ready for prime time," Yacov Wrocherinsky, president and CEO of ...