Archive

Is outsourcing still dragging down salaries of key IT talent in the U.S.? Not anymore, according to a new survey by Foote Partners, an IT consultancy based in New Canaan, Conn. According to the report, such adverse effects of outsourcing -- made an issue in last year's losing presidential campaign o...

Partnerships are increasingly under attack as less than credible in enterprise software, no more so than in CRM. Starting with classic logo and press release swaps between vendors desperate to fuel each other's sales pipelines, partnerships are met with increasing scrutiny in the world of enterpris...

If bad data is put into a data warehouse, companies risk what Tony Fisher, president and general manager at DataFlux, described as "code, load and explode." "If the data from a source system doesn't meet the expected qualities for that data, the loading process may fail, causing the company to stop ...

I have enjoyed reading Clayton Christensen's books on disruptive innovation and observing how many of the concepts articulated in his books have played out in the CRM market and beyond. With the theory in mind, it has been fascinating to watch as smart people have behaved in ways that are either pr...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been around since World War II, when the British Royal Air Force affixed tags to planes as a way to distinguish friend from foe, but it wasn't until 2003, when giant discount retailer Wal-Mart announced that it would require the tags on all shipments f...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at highe...

Oracle announced a compromise today on its licensing fee structure for dual-core Intel or AMD processors, which moves it closer in line with other software vendors. The database vendor had originally said it would continue to calculate licensing fees for its database and middleware products based on...

The big four processor vendors -- AMD, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems -- rely heavily on continual innovation and speed increases to fuel their businesses. At the heart of their strategies is Moore's Law. Simply stated, Moore's Law says that transistor density on integrated circuits roughly doubl...

Last week, Germany's upper house of Parliament, The Bundesrat, approved a bill to deploy passports containing biometric data, and the government is planning to issue the new passports this fall, clearing the way for German citizens to continue to come to the U.S. without a visa. A resolution passed ...

I was on vacation when the news came out and for the life of me I could not understand why Microsoft decided to announce version 3.0 of its CRM product a few days before July 4th -- the biggest public holiday of the year -- when practically no one was looking. They weren't alone. Siebel also made a...

Loyalty schemes had been around for years before their sponsors paired them with purchase power on credit or debit cards. For any best customer program, the business running it measures its effectiveness on two levels -- the top line and the bottom line. On both levels, co-branded and proprietary c...

Service has been restored on a damaged telecommunications cable that links India and Pakistan to the West, but not before the international service outage caused widespread financial damage, most especially to the cell center industry. Service on the cable was restored on Friday. The cable was damag...

Information technology experts warn that lingering security issues are making Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, another uncontrolled tool for identity theft. RFID is an old inventory control technology that is quietly being deployed throughout business and industry to track everything from pe...

About this time of the year, many manufacturers start believing their markets are saturated. Sales cycles are too quiet in July and August, and everyone from the CFO to the custodial staff get nervous. Too often manufacturers mistake a larger-than-normal dip in a sales cycle for market saturation....

The federal government's IT force is aging, and this year will see half of those employees retire, reports say. Additionally, the public sector has retained many of its legacy systems at the same time as private-sector industries have walked through fire and burned through considerable funds to upgr...