Archive

Cendant Corporation's Hotel Group and Marriott International today announced the signing of a letter of intent for Cendant to purchase Ramada International Hotels & Resorts, primarily a franchised brand of 204 hotels representing 27,728 rooms in 26 countries and territories. Pending approval by ...

German software giant SAP has opened a support center in China to serve its customers in China, Japan and Korea, the company said in a statement. The center will be based in Dalian, an industrial city in northeastern China. According to the company, 130 native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean a...

Much heat, and little light, is emanating from this season's political debate about the offshoring of American jobs. Like blind men trying to describe an elephant by touching and describing various parts, researchers and commentators have come up with very different assessments and conclusions, and ...

The global convenience retailer 7-Eleven Inc. is rolling out custom Hewlett-Packard technology in 5,300 U.S. locations. Both companies believe the partnership will transform convenience retailing, and some analysts agree. Aberdeen analyst Chris Selland says the plan could be revolutionary. "These gu...

In the early days of the dot-com boom, companies tracked "hits" and "eyeballs" and measured "stickiness" on their hastily created Web sites. As Web sites matured into viable business channels, however, these simple Web metrics proved to be of little value. Just as the customer data generated through...

SugarCRM, developer of Sugar Sales commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) application built on pure LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environments, has the release of Sugar Sales Professional. Incorporating Sugar Sales 1.5, a new distribution that also debuted last Thursday, Su...

A federal class action lawsuit filed Thursday accuses Salesforce.com, its CEO and its chief financial officer of withholding critical, detrimental financial information from potential investors in order to boost the share price of the company's IPO. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court i...

It is often said what separates one company's ability to develop, execute and sustain a CRM strategy is the active involvement of the CEO. But it goes deeper than that. Too many times channel management, pricing, order capture and even order management initiatives fail because the CEO pays lip servi...

Galyan's, the sporting goods retailer that features climbing walls, kayak demonstrations and archery ranges in its stores, offers an innovative CRM strategy, too. For four years, Galyan's has offered a stand-alone loyalty card that offers points for purchases, gift certificates for points and specia...

Lots of us think that the rise of the Internet over the last decade has turned us into a society totally connected with each other and to the world at large. Although we are definitely on the way, there's still a lot of work to be done. And as it turns out, the Internet has provided only the plumbin...

With Hurricanes Charley and Frances inflicting an estimated $40 billion worth of damage to the state of Florida in just three weeks, insurance companies have been forced onto high alert. "Natural disasters are our business," Jeanne Salvatore, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, told...

Customers today come in increasingly unique and differentiated segments. They want to be seen and approached as individuals with specific needs and to feel that offers address them personally. Satisfying these self-segmented customers requires a careful balance of science and art. While creative ide...

General Motors and Ford suffered declining U.S. sales in August. Each announced Wednesday that it will cut production in the fourth quarter, risking profitability for the calendar year. Chrysler, on the other hand, beat the bum month experienced by its competitors with its fifth straight month of sa...

Many people consider order management the heart of any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It's heresy in many manufacturing companies even to talk of changing from a home-grown order-management system to an outside ERP system. One world-class distributor is an example of one reason why. It h...

Siemens Business Services, SAP and Intel have announced a new radio frequency identification product. Privacy experts, however, continue to express concern about the technology. The new product allows suppliers to comply with demands from Wal-Mart, Target and German retailer Metro that they attach R...