Archive

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...

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...