Archive

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...

Call center operator InfoCision Management Corp. is adding teleservices representatives. Over the coming months several hundred people will join the company's call centers in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This growth seems to fly in the face of expectations following the implementation of th...

I got an interesting press release the other day. Headlined "SalesForce Loses CRM Lead," the release said that a new hosted CRM company, FreeCRM.com, claims 13,500 customers to Salesforce.com's 12,500. Hence the leadership change. As you might expect from the name, this company has amassed its con...

Oracle today officially released the mobile version of its grid computing database, 10g. A version of Database Lite 10g has been in use since 1996 as a means of accessing the main 10g database through PDAs, laptops and handheld computers. The company says its new release is a giant step ahead of the...

Twelve months ago, CRM faced some resentment in many organizations, but as the year progressed it began proving its value. "2004 was mainly a year of validating that CRM works, rather than [focusing] on major new functionality. A lot of companies focused on governance and integration, making what th...

While January 1 is a great mile-marker in any business timeline, the urgency for change needs to be dictated by honest assessments rather than by the flip of calendar pages. We all have enough to do already, and no one wants another action item list. That's why resolutions can turn out to be counte...

Just as many companies that adopted CRM applications years ago often failed to use the data they collected, call centers that tape inbound calls for regulatory compliance and quality assurance often lack the time and the staff to listen to the calls and learn from them. Enter speech analytics softwa...

At its best the selling life can be great fun, full of action and accomplishment. At its worst it can make pushing on a string look like the essence of productivity. As a practitioner, the thing you either love or hate about selling is change. As a market emerges and matures, the techniques that on...

Traditionally, e-mail program measurement focuses on overt consumer responses: We know that a customer has opened, clicked, perhaps even transacted -- but unless a coupon redemption is involved, our knowledge of why a response has occurred is often limited. With the focus in measuring e-mail progra...

Canadian outsourcing vendors tend to attract sophisticated work and projects closely tied to American culture and the English language. As such, despite the stronger numbers of outsourcing firms and employees in offshore locations such as India and the Far East, Canada is holding its own against ove...

Think of this scenario: You're shopping for a new home and instead of guiding you into a single-digit fixed-rate mortgage, lenders try to persuade you that an adjustable mortgage indexed to your income makes more sense. Structuring mortgages like that makes no sense, and it's making less and less se...

American businesses are struggling with retaining experienced customer service agents as demands and contacts increase along with higher expectations in the customer-driven economy. At the same time, the marching orders to the contact centers are to keep costs down, reduce call time, increase satisf...