Archive

Trying to make the disjointed pieces of Siebel's product strategy fit together is comparable to deconstructing a kaleidoscope and trying to create a mosaic from the pieces of randomly shaped colored glass. You'll get a colorful picture that's more abstract art than realism. You can't fault Siebel fo...

SAP's Sapphire user conference in New Orleans kicked off last week with a keynote by SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann, who called for more efforts to streamline the company's applications and bolster Web services adoption. Those twin themes were echoed frequently throughout the week in conferen...

Like the Trojan War, the battle between Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft, Inc. has languished for a while but soon may reach epic proportions. In this tale, however, the weapons are hostile takeover offers and the soldiers are chief financial officers, technical experts and attorneys. It's not clear yet ...

Customer-service managers are always looking for ways to boost agent productivity by shaving seconds off calls and increasing upsell rates. Indeed, if there were a customer-service crystal ball that could search through all customer interactions and spot future trends, visualizing patterns and notin...

Like a bevy of CRM software providers before it, Kana this week pushed out the first phase of its hosted onDemand initiative for its iCARE suite of Service Resolution Management (SRM) solutions. The company's onDemand project initially supports Kana's Response Live application, is available as eithe...

At its Sapphire '04 international customer conference in New Orleans today, SAP rolled out several new packaged offerings for CRM, ERP and vertical industry applications. The software is designed to help mid-market companies address specific business processes, accelerate implementation and achieve ...

Shoshana Zuboff is a genius, but don't just take my word for it. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote a book called The Support Economy with her husband and collaborator, James Maxmin. What makes Zuboff a genius is that although I think the book is about CRM, there is onl...

CRM is not just for the private sector, and -- in a rather dramatic illustration of that fact -- Siebel Systems has announced that its business applications will help maximize the readiness of the new Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. Use of commercial-off-the-shelf software, ...

About 7,500 C-level and senior executives from midsize to large companies are gathering this week to attend SAP's annual Sapphire conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Attendees -- some of whom are coming from as far away as Europe and Asia -- will have the opportunity to network with peers, learn a...

Hosted CRM vendor RightNow Technologies announced Monday that it has filed for an initial public offering to sell $60 million of its common stock with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The number of shares the company plans to offer and the price range for the offering are still to be det...

Rapid growth of information technology among small and medium businesses (SMBs) with between 100 and 1,000 employees has not been lost on some major integration players, including Microsoft and IBM. With this week's launch of IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express, Big Blue is attempting ...

Onyx, a mid-market provider of CRM software, has unveiled upgrades to its Contact Center product that are designed to help it branch deeper into the contact-center and vertical markets. The improvements include call-center scripting and enhanced Web self-service capabilities. As a result of Onyx' mo...

Tom Siebel announced this week that he is giving up the daily grind of running the company he started and instead plans to concentrate on his role as chairman of the board. Taking over as CEO is Mike Lawrie, a 26-year IBM veteran. There's no doubt that Siebel will continue to have a great influence ...

Aspect Communications, a provider of enterprise customer-service solutions, has announced it is postponing its proposed public offering of 12 million shares of common stock. The sale was to include the sale of 9.3 million shares by specific shareholders. According to the company, the sale was not in...

The former chief of sales at IBM has taken the reins at CRM software maker Siebel Systems as the company's founder, Tom Siebel, stepped aside amid pressure from anxious shareholders. Mike Lawrie, who previously served as head of sales and distribution at Big Blue, where he worked for more than 25 ye...