Archive

Oracle's OpenWorld conference last week in San Francisco combined the company's traditional shows Oracle AppsWorld and OracleWorld in the company's largest conference ever. More than 25,000 customers, vendor partners, Oracle employees and analysts took part. Even Microsoft made its first appearance....

It's time for a reality check: When it comes to managing e-commerce strategies in your company, how do results line up with expectations? Too many companies hold on to incredibly inefficient Web sites chock full of order capture systems that lead nowhere except to someone's Outlook folders, or catal...

Now that e-commerce is no longer a novelty, most corporations recognize some basic realities about online sales: Building and maintaining a Web site is no walk in the park; not all browsers are equally interested in buying; and when it comes to sales, slick Web copy can't replace the human touch. T...

Earlier this fall an MBA student from MIT's Sloan School gave me a call. He wanted to invite me to be a panelist at the Seventh Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. The conference was run by students and is part of something called MIT Innovation Week. This is a big deal in the Boston venture capi...

We live in a data-rich world. Data is everywhere you look, and used in so many ways -- to build e-mails, generate lists, create target groups, form reports, even to construct the foundation of a valid strategy. Yet data remains an elusive and stubborn beast, and it can become a point of contention b...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has won again, this time after an acrimonious,18-month-long battle with PeopleSoft, whose board of directors bowed today and agreed to a $10.3 billion takeover offer. In October, Oracle made what it called its "best and final offer" of $24 a share. The company then raised th...

The CRM systems of many companies fail because they don't properly manage the expectations of prospects and customers. What's been missing is the ability to capture the moment of truth with every prospect or customer and then bring these insights into a broader mosaic of what the many segments of ...

The end of the year is always a good time for top ten lists and forecasts of things to come. It's a way for analysts and pundits to show how smart we are and that we "knew it all along" -- or at least to exhibit our 20/20 hindsight. Here are my observations of what was important to CRM this year. Sa...

Loyalty card programs operated by grocery and drug retailers have been focused on rewarding shoppers for isolated activities. Typically, retailers dole out extra points for buying Brand A today or discount the price of Brand B during a given week and not much more. But now these loyalty programs are...

In the last U.S. presidential election the candidates clashed on the issue of privatizing the Social Security system. I'll leave the political debate to the professional politicians, but I would like to address this matter from the standpoint of millions of U.S. workers. Many of them are already b...

Sales methodologies and sales force automation (SFA) are a combination that should be a natural fit. In practice, however, method support is poor in most current forms of SFA. Sales managers want their representatives to follow the company's defined methodology, but often salespeople veer off cour...

Hewlett-Packard on Monday unveiled network management software developed from tools it acquired when it bought Novadigm and Consera Software earlier this year. OpenView Automation Manager is part of HP's plan to build a set of individually available components as a replacement for the unwieldy Utili...

Siebel Branch Teller, a new retail bank solution that invigorates cross sales and customer care at branches, finally brings CRM to the channel that originates most financial services relationships with consumers. The product, which uses IBM middleware specifically designed for the retail banking ver...

The introduction of retail RFID comes with many challenges: technological capability, the adoption of appropriate software architectures and the production of cohesive standards, to name but a few. Not the least of these challenges is finding ways to address the concerns of consumer privacy groups. ...

The time has come for not only a new faith in CRM but a new following -- by small and midsize companies. Since Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft introduced a CRM product to its Business Solutions line in January 2003, it has captured more than 2,500 small and midsize organizations representing mor...