Archive

Software developer SAP and chip designer Intel said today at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany, that they would collaborate on technology to allow companies to integrate data collected from RFID chips. "The announcement provides additional evidence that RFID is real and is moving from being ...

ChoicePoint Inc., a seller of information about most households and their inhabitants, became an overnight household name last month. The Alpharetta, Ga., company disclosed that criminals posing as legitimate business operators had acquired 145,000 consumer records in October 2004. This announcement...

Oracle, never a company to shy from head-on competition, announced today that it would outbid rival SAP in its attempt to buy software maker Retek, offering $9 per share. SAP had agreed last week to pay $8.50 a share. Oracle's offer bumps the bid for the retail applications provider from $496 millio...

The indirect sales channel has emerged as a sales environment distinctly different from conventional business-to-business or business-to-consumer selling. This shifting focus is long overdue, especially in industries such as technology, where a high percentage of products are sold through distributo...

The demand for enterprise portals -- software that connects the applications at work inside a company -- will be strong for the next five years, according to "Two Technologies, One Direction: How CRM and Enterprise Portals Can Coexist," a recent report by IDC. The report details the rapid adoption ...

There's a dangerous undercurrent tugging at even the best manufacturer and distribution channel relationships: the inability to set and manage expectations based on supply chain visibility. While many manufacturers insist they have the ability to make and keep commitments based on visibility into mu...

Vendors of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services have made big promises to corporate America and consumers about the cost savings to come from VoIP. The possibilities of VoIP savings have stirred excitement even among jaded CFOs. But the adoption of a technology that accommodates data and t...

Back when I sold software for a living -- this would be during the last ice age -- a witty software developer in my company stuck a floppy disk to his filing cabinet with a refrigerator magnet. Scrawled on the disk's label were our flagship product's name and the words "source code." A magnet applie...

Interactive marketing has come a long way. In 2005 it will appear more often not only on the big screen -- the computer screen, that is -- but on the little screen of the mobile phone as well. With a cell phone the constant companion to more than 170 million Americans, there's a lot of potential. A ...

The allure of automating the most common tasks involving channel partners, manufacturers and distributors is so sexy that this corner of the CRM market erupted with growth during the dot-com bubble. Today it's collapsing faster than a souffle pulled from the oven too fast. When the number of firms ...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis. Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must d...

It's not often that I get much of a response to a column, but my recent piece about spyware prompted several letters -- and not just the "let-me-tell-you-about-my-experience" kind. Meet Ben Edelman. Ben is every mother's dream, provided the mother in question wanted a doctor or a lawyer in the famil...

Many manufacturers rely on special pricing requests, or exceptions to standard pricing, for a large part of their indirect channel revenue. Even for direct accounts, many manufacturers have given their sales managers and regional directors control over price limits to increase responsiveness. But ...

These are exciting times to be a data analyst. I say this because two of the biggest barriers that have traditionally prevented analysts from effectively leveraging and acting upon data have been greatly reduced. The time required to compile and process data to make it useful for analysis plus our ...

Daniel H. Pink has written an interesting book that has important implications for the future of CRM. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, to be published next month, is excerpted in the February issue of Wired magazine. The book deals with the differences betwee...