Archive

Call centers that rely on VoIP without proper security measures could find themselves facing degraded quality of service, slowdowns, or no service at all. In addition, insecure lines could lead to information theft, leaving a call center liable.

What makes channel, sales and service partnerships messy? Contracts, lots of them, for office leases, for equipment, even to prove the partnerships' existence to local, state and national governments. Problems coordinating all these commitments -- buried in contracts that are stuffed into filing cab...

Professional courtesy, that's what I call it. It's the punch line to the question, "Why don't sharks eat lawyers?" It's also my reason for not criticizing other analysts in public. Besides, there's too much to write about to bother picking a public fight. If someone wants to promote a flat-earth t...

Social networking software and Web-based tools have proliferated in the past few years. These networks operate by creating a tree of contacts beginning with the user, followed by the friends and associates she or he extends an invitation to, the friends they extend an invitation to, and so on. The c...

Storage giant EMC today announced updates of two backup products, days after it went on the attack, beginning a campaign -- "Safe Switch" -- to lure customers from its rival and the leader in the backup software market, Veritas. EMC has released Legato NetWorker 7.2 and Dantz Retrospect 7 for Window...

Too many companies seem to believe that the right technology is the key to e-commerce success. But the firms that really make e-commerce pay off don't simply hand over their e-commerce destinies to consultants, system integrators or vendors. Instead, they undertake the hard work of self-examination....

Quite a few companies are offering solutions that provide automated customer service in one way or another. There is a lot to be said about this trend, and much of it is good. The days of long waits on hold or frustrating attempts to navigate a series of phone menus are winding down, and in many ca...

You can possess a business card that says you're the boss, or be promoted to a position that gives you control and authority over other people, but that doesn't necessarily make you a leader. The definition of a true leader is someone who gets the job done, along with the efforts of other people who...

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing types of consumer fraud, and banks in particular fear that such crimes will hinder consumer online banking activity. A recent study on bank account phishing and hacking from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reveals that single-factor authenticati...

Too often channel strategies ranging from the most tactical and short-term to the most strategic and multiyear fail. Success or failure of a channel management strategy has nothing to do with the time horizon and everything to do with perspective, timing and getting away from a "one-and-done" menta...

Over the last few weeks, I have been busy putting the finishing touches on a new report scheduled for delivery to market later this month. My premise was that there might be a lot of enterprising companies in CRM or closely associated markets that are either new or that have new ideas that we should...

Having gobbled up JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, Oracle yesterday held a coming out party for "Project Fusion," its plan to meld the products of the three companies and hold onto the customer base for which it paid $10.5 billion. "The big news is that Oracle is not forcing customers to migrate," Evan Qu...

Hoping to gain traction with PeopleSoft customers unnerved by Oracle's recent takeover, SAP has acquired TomorrowNow, a leading PeopleSoft support and maintenance vendor. With the acquisition of Bryant, Texas-based TomorrowNow, SAP is working to insinuate itself into the enterprise software upgrade ...

As database services become increasingly commoditized, the value of databases depends more and more upon advanced consumer analytics. The technology exists both for aggregating data to input into analyses and for acting on results of such analyses in a multitude of ways and through a variety of chan...

While all eyes were focused on Oracle closing the PeopleSoft deal this week, a series of announcements from SAP and Microsoft may prove to be even more significant to the IT industry overall and to CRM specifically in the long term. Within the next five years SAP and Microsoft will change the landsc...