Archive

The path to SOA must consider several typical approaches. SOA adoption is a gradual process. While some organizations dabble with Web services by wrapping applications as a means of exploring the world of SOA and deciding how to proceed, others engage in enterprise-wide business transformation. Othe...

Last week in New York, Salesforce.com improved its position in the CRM suite market when it introduced version 2.0 of its service and support offering. The company has quickly come up the curve to a point where it has approximate parity with other companies offering a range of support options inclu...

With the dust still settling from Oracle's US$5.85 billion purchase of Siebel Systems, SAP is taking a run at Siebel customers, hoping to capitalize on what it calls "uncertainties" about the future of Siebel after Oracle takes control. But Siebel is going on an offensive of its own, telling custome...

The recently released results of the Corporate Executive Board's 2005 Benchmarking Survey shows just how involved marketing departments from B2B, high tech, B2C -- indirect channels to B2C -- and direct channels are in managing a significant part of their company's total spending on competitor, indu...

If your attention to on demand CRM has been focused on the sales and marketing side of the equation, RightNow comes as something of a surprise because this company's origins focus on service and support -- an important differentiator and well worth remembering as on demand vendors, including this on...

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, increased availability doesn't necessarily mean increased costs. A number of companies are combining two common technologies to improve their total availability without draining their total IT budget. The secret is to teach your old servers new tricks. At the top of ...

Mass merchandisers are redefining what's needed to launch a product through indirect channels, and the fact that bargain-hunting prospects for many products use the high-priced channels to do research and buy online anyway is making Web product introductions a path to greater profits for manufacture...

Whoever controls the basic customer information controls the front office. In order to have the customer information, you need to have a data schema that can support it. That means a schema that supports things like products, invoices, purchase orders and much more. If you think this is beginning...

When Oracle agreed early in September to buy former rival Siebel Systems for US$5.85 billion, some questioned how long Siebel would continue its CRM OnDemand service. That question came to light because Oracle rival IBM plays a big role in the on-demand service. Yesterday, Siebel responded with the ...

Companies allocate significant resources to customer satisfaction measurement and improvement. Wayne Hoyer, chairman of the marketing department at University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, says satisfaction with product or service quality has a strong and positive impact on customers...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

As Microsoft once again renews its efforts to target small to mid-sized companies, many in the software industry express skepticism, while others welcome the competition. Just how committed is Microsoft to the small to mid-market software segment? As many critics will point out, this is not the firs...

It's worth taking another look at the Siebel-Oracle merger from a different angle. Too often we make a snap judgment in this kind of situation and it becomes fixed in the mind never to be seriously re-examined. Rather than that, I did a thought experiment the other day starting with the presumptio...

As goods and services increasingly become commoditized on a global scale, companies are looking for new ways to reduce costs, customer churn, and make the most of their existing customer base. In order to whittle down their overhead, many companies are looking at outsourcing their service delivery g...

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the inno...