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SAP has announced that its second quarter earnings rose by 15 percent in software revenue, as well as by 15 percent in operating income and 14 percent in net income. The quarterly numbers are close to what the company had anticipated when it estimated its performance in early July. It released predi...

Sales and marketing departments are under increasing pressure to produce stellar results while creating cost and process efficiencies. That pressure, along with a desire to cultivate and retain business, has fed demand for a multitude of CRM solutions. If you can fully understand your customers and ...

Just as technology has changed the landscape of corporate environments, it is predicted to transform how medicine is done, according to a recent survey. The 2004 Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study was conducted by Hospitals & Health Networks, a publication put out by the American Hospital ...

The process for choosing a CRM vendor is important to getting the best results. A successful approach is revealed in the following scenario for how the process might proceed: An old friend called me a few weeks ago looking for advice. Steve is the CEO of a small software company with a fresh infusio...

Maine isn't normally considered a hotbed for emerging-technology entrepreneurialism. Yet that's where IntelliCare, a healthcare call center outsourcing company, started in 1997. By 1999, the company had put its Yankee pragmatism to work to create a distributed networking model for telephonic nursing...

Companies looking at new CRM, order capture and even distributed order-management systems tend to give too much credibility to the vendors outside their company first, dismissing their own internal resources. What's troubling about this is that the answers to their toughest questions may very well b...

With facilities in 25 states and the District of Columbia, Beverly Enterprises is among the largest providers of eldercare in the U.S. Through its Beverly Healthcare division, it provides 367 skilled nursing homes and 19 assisted living facilities. Ninety of its facilities have Alzheimer's Disease c...

IBM has signed an agreement to acquire Alphablox Corporation, a privately held company based in Mountain View, California. The acquisition is expected to close later this month, but financial details were not disclosed. According to the companies, Alphablox's operations will be integrated into IBM's...

Scott Fitzgerald once famously observed that there are no second acts in American life. I don't agree because for me, if anything, America is, and has always been, the land of the second chance. On this topic, William Faulkner comes much closer to the reality that I know. I've always been partial to...

SAP announced Friday that after a preliminary review of its 2004 second-quarter performance, it expects a software revenue increase of 15 percent compared to the same quarter last year. At constant currencies, second-quarter software revenues could be up by 17 percent, and total revenues are expecte...

Look long enough at any company's Web site, C-level presentations, earnings conference calls or marketing efforts, and you'll find the phrases like, "customer-centered," "The customer comes first always," and "The customer is the center of the business." They are all noble thoughts to be sure, but t...

When I started researching the difference between effectiveness and efficiency, as these terms relate to sales-force automation software, I was surprised that some dictionaries use the two words to define each other. The difference between effectiveness and efficiency was rather slight in those book...

It's the petroleum supply chain that gets your gas to the pumps. Like any supply chain, it has the same source, create and deliver model. But unlike others, the petroleum business involves huge amounts of liquid of varying grades that must be contained and transported to highly involved and interdep...

What do the most successful CRM implementations have in common? In a global survey designed to find out, IBM Business Consulting Services (BCS) learned that the factors that most impact a project's success are not necessarily the obvious, big-ticket items. The survey, which identified the 16 most cr...

For the second time in as many years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has slapped a violation for Regulation FD, short for "fair disclosure," on CRM vendor Siebel Systems. The June 29th charge also says that the company violated an SEC cease-and-desist order placed on it for an earlier b...