Archive

With recent regulatory developments in the industry and routine call center functions moving to offshore teleservices vendors, there is no time like the present for the Call Center Research Laboratory established at the University of Southern Mississippi a few weeks ago. The CCRL, led by USM profess...

Luck plays a role in life. I don't pretend to understand it, and I believe we make our own luck, but occasionally we also inherit some from the cosmos. How else do you explain the timing of Salesforce.com's announcements last week at DreamForce, its annual user group meeting in San Francisco? The ...

Long known as a technology and hardware provider, Unisys has pushed to diversify, joining the ranks of large systems integrators just when many companies are drawn to the simple, low-risk offerings of hosted solutions providers. Unisys, however, sees that trend as temporary, and its CRM leaders feel...

Making inroads into the next major market for software isn't going to happen from enterprise vendors trying to wedge expensive, large application footprints into a product strategy that appeals to medium-sized companies. Despite Oracle, Siebel and others proclaiming they can make this strategy work...

Intermec Technologies has cleared the path for retail companies to test second-generation radio-frequency identification (RFID) products and move toward wide-scale adoption. The company will suspend for 60 days its intellectual property licenses to stimulate RFID manufacturers to create and test sys...

Analyzing the industry analysts has become a popular indoor sport in CRM and beyond. Ever since the scandals involving a few financial analysts kiting stocks for their investment bank employers, there has been an attempt to upgrade the standards by which financial analysts are judged and to apply t...

Salesforce.com today announced the expansion of its on-demand service with Winter '05. The product line includes Salesforce.com Winter '05, Supportforce.com Winter '05, sforce 5.0 and the new on-demand customization toolkit, Customforce.com. Winter '05 will provide the applications, customization to...

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia and semiconductor maker Royal Philips Electronics plan to test a contactless transportation payment system in Germany next year. The pair are working with Rhein-Main Verkehrsverbund (RMV) public transportation authority on a pilot program that will allow consumers to ...

Finally, there's an end in sight. PeopleSoft stockholders have until Nov. 19 to tender their stock for Larry Ellison's "best and final offer" of $24 a share -- cash -- or $9.2 billion for the whole enchilada. If they don't, Ellison has promised to call it quits, something the multibillionaire mogul ...

There's a major disconnect between the expectations and results companies are getting when they realign processes aimed at serving their customers, as I've discovered in conversations with several manufacturers. There are several reasons why these unrealistic expectations take hold. First, nearly ev...

Each season, Legoland Denmark welcomes 1.6 million guests, and about 1,600 of them end up getting lost. This spring, the theme park adopted an AeroScout RFID location solution, offering parents use of an RFID bracelet for their children at a nominal fee. If their children wander away from them in th...

SAP and Hewlett-Packard announced today they will jointly offer a business management tool that they say brings enterprise-level best practices to small and medium-size businesses. The hosted software will be priced on a per-user basis, starting at $325 per month. SAP's software will sit on top of H...

Forgive me, but amid all the excitement of the baseball post-season, it's hard to believe there are other important things going on in the world. Last week some important earnings numbers came out of the communications departments of archrivals SAP and Siebel, which I only got to after reading the e...

The European Commission, the regulatory body of the European Union, today removed the final anti-trust barrier to Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft. Not only did the European Commission meeting in Brussels, Belgium, end its yearlong consideration of the merger in Oracle's favor, it did so without stip...

In some ways the buzz about business intelligence analytics, an increasingly common add-on to a smart and established CRM system, resembles the buzz five years or so ago about CRM. Maybe the two don't match up just so, but organizations do have to exercise caution in choosing BI analytics solutions,...