Archive

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. By inc...

Mobile marketing may just be in its infancy, but it already has ushered in a world of new risks -- or rather, existing risks that have been repackaged. They range from running afoul of still-developing regulations to security concerns, to consumers misinterpreting content. Keeping a marketing messag...

Microsoft this week announced general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. The Infrastructure as a Service offering previously had been in limited release. The cloud service lets users deploy full virtual machines created from a gallery of pre-populated templates built into its man...

About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. I believed that for two reasons. First, I believed social media was inevitable, though I had no idea what form it would take. Facebook was not on my radar and had not officially launched, MySpa...

Kana Software on Tuesday debuted its next generation of Kana Enterprise, a multichannel customer service application with functionality for both the agent-based desktop and self-service. Its features include case management; Web self-service; mobile chat; co-browsing; social listening, analytics and...

Blackbaud, a CRM vendor that specializes in the nonprofit sector, has rolled out a new release offering additional social and mobile functionality. The end goal of the various upgrades -- which range from social scoring to the ability to run on a number of different tablets -- is to allow users to b...

As mobile marketing evolves, so do its risks. The Federal Trade Commission last month released its updated "Dot Com" guidelines. An update long in coming -- the first since the report was released in 2000 -- the guidelines take special note of mobile. In short, they state that the same rules that ap...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of sal...

Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America. It seems to have worked, because eve...

Airline travel experiences were relatively satisfactory for passengers in 2012, based on a number of metrics -- except for the most telling one of all: customer complaints. Those rose sharply, according to the Airline Quality Rankings Report, which examined 14 of the largest U.S. airlines and their ...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a l...

Salesforce.com has upgraded Salesforce Chatter with a new feature that collects and aggregates unstructured data -- or perhaps better put, social intelligence -- onto one page for easy reference. The feature is called Chatter Topics and Expertise, and it lets users find information and related resou...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...

SugarCRM and Colosa are getting set to debut a new Sugar module based on a visual tool that lets users design business process workflows inside SugarCRM. They'll be able to control the way tasks get routed; track how long it takes to complete; and control which screens get displayed and their order....

Marketing automation company Marketo filed paperwork with the SEC on Tuesday to launch an initial public offering valued at $75 million. The company has not yet proposed a stock price. It does say in the filing that it is considered an "emerging growth company," and it plans to list on Nasdaq under ...