Archive

This past May mobile app developers dodged a bullet when a California state court sided with Delta Airlines in a dispute over its mobile app. California's attorney general had sued Delta, alleging that the company violated the state's mobile privacy law, which requires a company to clearly state tha...

It's no secret that Salesforce.com has already inspired virtually countless ancillary products and services, including Thunderhead.com's ONE Correspond for Salesforce 2.0. Another example launched even more recently, however, is HP Relate, a cloud-based document management product that provides tool...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. Then there's the idea of social CRM -- on a basic level, the inclusion of social media-generated data in the customer record -- which can help shift the way a business interacts w...

OK, the title's a cheap riff on the T.S. Elliot book of poems that inspired Cats -- but stay with me, this goes places. A big group of cats is called a "clowder." What if we could access a clowder of big data? Big Data has been taking up a big part of my conscious life lately, what with all the anal...

Another day, another mobile app release; except in this case, the app is aimed at the contact center supervisor -- not exactly a role that has been inundated with mobile functionality to this point. The application in question is Five9's latest cloud contact software application, which includes mobi...

Almost a year after launching its ONE Correspond for Salesforce, Thunderhead.com rolled out version 2.0 of its social enterprise app. A part of the company's flagship ONE Engagement Platform, ONE Correspond for Salesforce allows users to create communications for customers. Via Salesforce's Chatter,...

Pegasystems held PegaWorld in 'PegOrlando' this week, and a good show it was. I have always wondered about the difference between CRM (social and otherwise) and BPM, or business process management, so I was happy to attend. Both CRM and BPM deal with the interaction between the vendor and customer,...

Overdraft costs on consumer checking accounts vary widely across financial institutions and often result in more costs and more involuntary account closures for consumers who opt into such coverage, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported on Tuesday.

Mobile everything is the current computing zeitgeist and if that means turning an app or function that is perfectly suited for desktop use into a mobilized one, well, as the thinking goes at so many companies now, just do it. However, mobilizing an app -- even a front-office CRM app -- should not be...

It has been a busy three years for Bonitasoft. Since its launch, the company has: 1) commercialized its open source business process management technology, which it created out of the Bonita Project in the mid-2000s; 2) pulled in $28 million in venture funding; and 3) attracted some 600 customers, i...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many....

Salesforce.com has made its biggest acquisition ever: The company has snagged marketing automation and campaign management vendor ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. As part of the transaction, Salesforce will acquire all outstanding ExactTarget stock for $33.75 per share in cash. Both companies' boards o...

I seem to be doing a lot of research and writing about Big Data this year. I am taking a lot of briefings from emerging analytics companies too, and I see it all as net good because the emphasis on data and analytics is really an emphasis on information, an economic indicator of sorts for me. The th...

BigContacts has unveiled a new iteration of its CRM application. BigContacts 2.0 is a full-featured CRM suite "that is couched in a simple and easy-to-use format," said founder and CEO Bob Walton. That is a point of pride for the company. "We have taken the pillars of what a CRM system needs and mad...

Siebel saved my life. Not really but sort of. By the early 1990s, I had been selling software for what seemed like a lifetime and dealing with the typical frustrations of life in sales. There weren't enough leads, and there was always more work to do than you could squeeze into a day. I kept records...