Archive

Customer data integration (CDI) hubs continue to become a strategic driver for organizations who need to gain unified views of their customers across their sales and distribution channels for multiple product lines. However, while CDI initiatives have become one of the top five priorities for most ...

Siebel, it is clear, has been on a tear to close out what is likely to be its last quarter as an independent company as strongly as possible. Announcing robust fourth-quarter revenues, CEO George T. Shaheen credited "the market opportunity in customer facing solutions and business analytics, the imp...

The mantra of selling solutions has taken enterprise software by storm and nowhere is this more prevalent than CRM. Honestly, it seems like the more challenging and difficult it is to sell into specific sectors of CRM, the more "solution-selling" is being invoked. This newfound religion is truly t...

Along with its preliminary financial results for the fourth quarter, SAP gave the markets notice that its hosted-CRM application will be available in February. CEO Henning Kagermann made the revelation during an analyst briefing on Wednesday morning. As with previous quarters, SAP's earnings reflect...

SplendidCRM, formed in November 2005, is getting set to enter the increasingly crowded open-source CRM marketplace. It released a second beta version of SplendidCRM 1.0, an application licensed, in part, under the SugarCRM Public License. It plans to offer this version -- give or take a few tweaks -...

Have you noticed the "dial 'O' for a human" movement gathering steam? One related manifestation is the clever set of ads put out by Citibank for its credit cards. You may have seen the ads showing a man calling for service and navigating through the tragedy that is the automated call response syst...

Sparking the interest of retailers around the globe, UK supermarket chain Tesco announced it will be selling Internet-based phone service and handsets on a pay-as-you-go basis. Tesco's move is more than a product announcement; by private labeling a VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, service, Tes...

Communispace, BlueRoads, Rearden Commerce, Knowlagent, Five9, ShareMethods, RightNow Technologies, Eloqua and Salesforce.com are the winners of this year's CRM WizKids Awards, annual accolades bestowed by Beagle Research Group. A few of the recipients -- notably Salesforce.com, RightNow and Five9 --...

The vast majority of SAP applications get sold because there is an ERP instance somewhere in the organization to tie back to. Rarely, if ever, in the years of doing primary research on SAP's customer base, would I find a reference to one that had just come on board for its channel management applic...

At a recent corporate event, Oracle provided much additional detail about integration and architecture plans for its Fusion project -- the company's strategy to deliver next-generation applications, middleware and architecture based on its recent acquisitions. However, the CRM sector is still in the...

For the last two years, I have been talking and writing about the importance of a new kind of on-demand application platform that would enable users to have instant access to best-of-breed software that would integrate with whatever else they were using. Essentially, I have been talking about what ...

During the past several years, the call center industry has grown more than 14 percent. In the United States alone, there are more than 2.7 million call center agents making up 3 percent of the total workforce. With this explosion, customers are demanding a higher level of personal service, an incre...

Microsoft has introduced an upgraded version of a product it quietly rolled out last year. Called Customer Care Framework 2005, it is a desktop application for contact-center operators that provides customer-care information via e-mail, instant messaging, interactive voice response and the partner-d...

It's that time of year again when we announce who the WizKids are. Confused? It's our annual award to emerging companies and companies with emerging innovations. When you get right down to it, we track new and cool stuff and report on it. Two years ago, we started the process with a simple questi...

Salesforce.com has made a newly expanded version of the AppExchange -- a platform that extends its CRM suite to other business lines -- generally available with its Winter '06 release. The AppExchange connects users with new applications developed by such third-party vendors as Adobe, Business Objec...