Archive

When Marc Benioff asked me in New York what I thought of last week's Salesforce.com briefing and demonstration of CustomForce, I had to tell him the truth. I was impressed but not surprised -- after all, I have been writing about this approach to new application development and integration for over...

The last two weeks have exposed me to the down side of becoming reliant on technology. It's not like we have a choice in many cases, our lives demand we split our time to enable us to multi-task and try to be in multiple places in nearly the same instant and the only way that happens is through rel...

In good times marketing and sales get all the credit for increases in sales and profits, but in bad times, IT gets the brunt of the cost-cutting pressure. What have been missing are truer measures of Return on Investment (ROI) for companies adopting customer-facing strategies. What's really needed ...

The seasons of CRM are hard to describe but nevertheless interesting; they follow no conventional calendar and things tend to bunch up in a short time window in the spring and fall, preceded and followed by long periods of relative equilibrium. Last year I wrote about what I called the silly season...

The outsourcing and offshoring of business tasks rarely fails to generate controversy, with horror stories of company veterans training their overseas replacements and major projects that were farmed out only to flame out. However, if done properly, outsourcing -- whether in another state or in anot...

The bottom line is that despite promising a 360 degree view of the customer, and all the benefits of that level of visibility into customer relationships, CRM systems continue to suffer from lack of the one essential element that would make all these applications come together: trust. It's not the l...

Several macro trends are working their way through the CRM industry right now and having a direct impact on how CRM is sold. These trends include application hosting, tailoring horizontal CRM applications to fit the specific needs of vertical markets, and increasing reliance by software vendors on ...

A number of companies -- start-ups and established firms alike -- are eying the organic RFID tags market. Venture capital firms, like ITU Ventures, are placing seed investment bets on developers with patented prototypes. But despite the hype, the goal of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag t...

During the last downturn nearly every enterprise software vendor stayed alive for a quarter or more due to their support and maintenance revenue streams. Today, support and maintenance comprises the majority of revenue for many CRM vendors, both public and private. Existing customers are carrying t...

We've now completed our study of the call center. We did it because we wanted to learn about the trend that has executives looking to generate revenue from this part of the business that has traditionally been focused on servicing customers. I believe several long-term trends are currently at work...

The bottom line is that today the analytics used in many small manufacturing companies starts and ends with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are entire manufacturing operations run off Excel, fulfilling the roles of demand planner, manufacturing scheduling, and the continual maintenance of bills...

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate. A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-bus...

I really wanted to write about something other than Siebel this week. No such luck. There's so much news swirling around the CRM leader that you can do pretty well as a columnist just analyzing the analysis that has come forward so far. In case you've been time traveling or stuck in another dimens...

European retailers, like Germany's Metro and the UK's Marks & Spencer, are aggressively moving forward with RFID projects -- with a creative flair that appears to exceed that of their American rivals, experts say. A host of cultural, political and legal factors in Europe are helping push the tre...

Prospects, customers and investors must have a lingering question in their minds with the announcement of a new CEO at Siebel: "Since George Shaheen was already on the board and capable of major influence, why haven't things changed already?" Putting a board member into the CEO slot seems like wind...