Archive

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...

IT vendors -- from RFID tech providers to supply chain management software companies -- have descended upon the National Retail Federation's 95th annual convention and expo in New York City to show off their latest applications and technologies. In the CRM space, vendors such as SAS Institute and Ep...

Siebel Systems has pre-announced sales that vastly surpassed its own and Wall Street's expectations: It said it expects to report fourth quarter revenue of US$469 million -- a 30 percent to 38 percent increase from its last forecast, and a 20 percent rise from the same quarter a year ago. License re...

Many sales forces seem to be stuck in a time warp. Selling with a transaction focus to customers who require a consultative or even enterprise approach is driving the cost of supporting these misaligned sales forces to the point of being unaffordable. Conversely, there are companies out there that ...