Archive

Microsoft is taking a bottom-up approach to customer relationship management with the second release of its CRM software, but one analyst said the software giant won't stay in the small market forever. "It makes sense to come from the bottom," Joe Wilcox, senior analyst, Jupiter Research, told CRM B...

Should radio frequency identification tags be used on identification cards? Will RFID on ID cards prevent or promote identity theft? While some are praising the technology as a great way to protect people, others deride it as a security nightmare. Jeff Schmidt, an independent security consultant ba...

Even when companies outsource some functions, they often keep control over far more than their core competencies. Unless outsourcing will deliver a cost savings with equal or better service quality, they keep it in-house. "They say, 'We want a service level, a service assurance at a price, and if yo...

Watching an otherwise relaxed executive from a CRM vendor nearly jump out of his chair this week over lunch when his BlackBerry went off instantly reminded me of one of my neighbor's boys bouncing with excitement after unwrapping a Sony Personal PlayStation (PSP) for his birthday. Then it dawned on...

Damage to the undersea telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3) Monday initially disrupted most of Pakistan's international telephone and Internet connections, but the outage spread to India, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Djibouti as repairs were started yesterday. Call centers in India using...

One of the best parts of being an analyst or a journalist is that you get pretty easy entry to some of the most interesting companies in your space. I feel particularly fortunate to be able to call up a company to ask for a briefing. Most of the time they say yes and I get to spend an hour or so o...

When it comes to measuring their customers' satisfaction, too many companies have settled into a comfortable rut of changing their approaches to get the results they want. It's like buying a treadmill with the mile counter sped up; if we all could perform at such accelerated levels we'd all be Olym...

SAP announced today it would buy Lighthammer Software Development, which makes applications that help manufacturers monitor and manage their plants. "Lighthammer was already a good partner of SAP's, and was primarily sold as a value-add layer over solutions like SAP manufacturing, so it makes utter ...

When I was in high school, the summer reading list included titles like "Great Expectations" which were sure to induce a coma-like state if I tried to read them while hanging out at the pool or beach. As adults we look for mindless potboiler paperbacks to stuff in the beach bag and maybe we feel a ...

South America and Central America are increasingly becoming popular destinations for information technology outsourcing -- whether it is offshore, nearshore or even "rightshore." "Central and South American countries are improving on outsourcing competitiveness," said Mark Minevich, international st...

In a move designed to quickly expand its call center capacity and productivity, Vonage today announced its sales and service subsidiary, Vonage America, has chosen Avaya's SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions. Vonage, a provider of broadband telephony in North America, hopes the move wil...

Online marketers are in a quandary. Their customers prefer e-mail as a vehicle of communication, but spammers have poisoned that well, making it very difficult for legitimate advertisers to deliver their messages to their loyal customers. However, Think360, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas, thinks ...

There's a burning question on the minds of many marketing, sales and support execs these days and it is: "How do I reach the influencers that really matter to my business?" A common question that comes up often in marketing planning meetings, these execs are realizing that the influencers most visi...

The big CRM news last week was Siebel's announcement initiating a dividend for its investors. In an open letter to shareholders, CEO George Shaheen announced the 2.5 cent dividend in typical Wall Street-ese, promising that future payments would be based on a decision of the board and, obviously, on...

Partitioning of servers in the data centers of its top customers is putting pressure on Oracle, which is making a number of moves to cope with the trend, experts say. Earlier this month, Oracle changed its licensing terms for users of Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10.0 operating system, lowering the pri...