Archive

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...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for ...

In an effort to strengthen its market position in the retail industry, SAP today announced it is acquiring a privately-held Canadian point-of-sale software provider. SAP said it plans to purchase Toronto-based Triversity, whose product portfolio includes traditional and enterprise point-of-sale, sto...

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's C...

On Monday, Oracle announced its US$5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems, its largest competitor and tag-team vendor to many of its customers. The acquisition came as no surprise to industry experts, although the timing of it preceded some experts' expectations. "We were actually a bit surpris...

It's very rare that you get clean demarcations between historical eras. Maybe the asteroid hitting the earth 65 million years ago was such an event, but I wasn't there to experience it so I can't tell you. Monday, Sept. 12, 2005 will go down as a deep line in the sand identifying the before and a...

Oracle has agreed to buy Siebel Systems in a deal worth US$5.8 billion, continuing an acquisition spree that began with the controversial takeover of PeopleSoft and has included a number of smaller companies since. Oracle said the deal would make it the world's top vendor of CRM software, surpassing...

Consumer satisfaction with wireless phone service providers has slipped significantly over the last year, according to an annual study released by J.D. Power and Associates yesterday. Overall, satisfaction fell 10 percent compared to 2004. That's the largest year-over-year change in satisfaction sin...

Blogs are the ultimate content carrier for the Internet. While they have much in common with a Web site, they are smaller than a Web site and require much less care -- most of the drudgery is performed more or less automatically once you've made a few setting adjustments. About the only thing you ...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

In lots of examples like PCs, databases, and even CRM, a concept is so new (a discontinuous innovation) that there is nothing like it, which means there is no true analog to replace. The idea of replacement is fundamental because the innovation can't take over another niche. Effective use of the i...

It's good to question assumptions about your customer base from time to time and test them just to make sure they are still accurate. One of the strongest lessons learned from the Internet is just how much many manufacturers don't know about our own channels, customers, pricing, and products. The I...