Archive

Last week Siebel Systems kicked off its annual EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) user group meeting in Barcelona with the introduction of George Shaheen, the company's new CEO. After a tumultuous prior week in which the abrupt change of leadership was announced, the company and its customers got...

Microsoft and SAP announced today they are working to build a program -- code named "Mendocino" -- to link together Microsoft's Word office suite with SAP's enterprise software, a move that analysts say could have a profound effect on the entire market. "The possibility of a close relationship betw...

There are many CRM solutions that track click-throughs, e-mail responses or track ads, but Manticore Technology today released a solution that does all three and takes that a step further to the generation of sales leads. The leads are discovered by organizing information from online marketing campa...

The wireless industry is mounting a very public defense for a controversial application of "contactless smart cards" while a number of consumer groups and privacy advocates have decried the technology as potentially invasive of personal privacy. Former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Securit...

Now that Oracle's acquisition spree has ended, the giant database company is focusing on melding the product lines of PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Retek into a cohesive Fusion. At a customer conference Wednesday, Oracle released its Fusion roadmap and a few more details on what customers can expect,...

For the last four years I've been teaching an international business course occasionally for a local MBA Program. My students are all working professionals who come to class for discussion and debate, not sermons. Case studies are the perfect teaching tool for this audience; there is plenty of roo...

It seems like all the interesting news breaks when I am out of the country. I was in Paris, attending a venture capital conference for emerging IT companies, when I got the news that Siebel Systems had missed its revised revenue forecast and sacked its CEO. The trip had been planned around my atte...

May I take your order please?" These sometimes-garbled words uttered through a speaker at your local drive-through restaurant may soon originate from a different city or even another state thanks to new customer-relationship-management technology. Hardee's -- part of CKE Restaurants Inc. in Carpint...

In the CRM arena, there are several myths surrounding best practices, and these myths get more pronounced the closer systems are to channels and customers. The situation gets worse as the pressure is increased to produce results from people you have no direct control over. Despite all the hype, best...

Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, once said that the technology life-cycle goes through three phases -- do it, do it right, and do it fast. Maybe that was true of mini-computers, but today I would amend it to something like, do it, lower the cost, and make it small. If you look at...

In the economic clouds of recent years, marketers discovered a silver lining in multichannel marketing. Numerous reports and case studies showed that online marketing of big-ticket items such as automobiles improved offline purchases. In recent research, MSN and research partners the Advertising Res...

Customer data integration (CDI) is becoming important for enterprises who want to target, acquire, develop and retain customers. In order to benefit from it, however, an enterprise needs to create a unified and comprehensive customer view from all disparate data sources -- including CRM, financial,...

When is a sales representative not a sales representative? That sounds like one of those brain teasers we learned as kids. Back when we had all the time in the world we could spend hours puzzling about the seeming contradictions in a simple question like, "What walks on four legs when young, two whe...

Oracle has made its third purchase in less than a year, announcing today that it has acquired Oblix, a small identity management software company. Terms of the sale were not announced. Oblix's security software allows for Web access control of single sign-on, identity administration and user provisi...

Phishing is one of the most significant threats to online consumers, and as the incidence of this type of fraud increases, so does the perpetrators' average take. Phishers who lucked out and lured several customers of a British bank into false communications recently made off with an average of 5,00...