Archive

SAP on Wednesday unveiled a rapid-deployment solution for marketers. It lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources. Users can combine the information with CRM text data and, if they so choose, business intelligence applications to ...

I dropped a small stone in a large pool last week, and the ripples are still spreading. In a separate post I wrote that IT is over. I was very careful to say that IT is over as a disruptive innovation and as an economic engine, but few understood what I meant, so I thought this would be a good cha...

Oracle has released version 20 of its Oracle CRM On Demand product. It is a major release with significant upgrades to the industry-specific life sciences vertical as well as horizontal functionality, said Anthony Lye, SVP for cloud applications strategy. "We have made improvements and enhancements ...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...

When Yardi CRM launched in the fall of 2010, it was targeting what it saw as a lack of industry-specific CRM within the commercial real estate broker industry. While standalone CRM applications -- even lightweight ones that reside in the cloud -- can work wonders for small and medium-sized businesse...

WORX, a power tool company, has a unique Pinterest board: one devoted entirely to tools that aid in zombie defense. The WORX JawSaw, for instance, has a pin that tells consumers to "accessorize before they rise, and protect yourself now!" The board's sense of humor makes it especially effective on t...

What's the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business last quarter -- the first loss in a decades-long string of positive earnings from the world's biggest software company. Sheesh! Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but the loss signals the breadth and depth of the impa...

When Mary-Jane Mehlenbacher left the corporate world to have her daughter, she didn't realize she would be leaving behind network marketing software that worked. Mehlenbacher had decided to form her own home-based network marketing company but couldn't find an appropriate CRM software application th...

Every time people post an update, "like" a page, or otherwise engage with social media, their movements are tracked, followed and recorded. For businesses, this data is a gold mine of information about consumer thinking, preferences and opinions. "Businesses should view social media as a treasure tr...

When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say I write about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRM investment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize and economize their customer data and how it's handled. W...

New mobility and security features are among the areas of focus in Avaya's latest iteration of Avaya IP Office 8.1, its unified communications platform for small and mid-sized enterprises. The company also built out the scale of the application; it is now able to serve 1,000 users in a single locati...

Kana plans to build out its customer service experience management bona fides with its recent acquisition of contact center provider Ciboodle from the Sword Group. The point of the acquisition is to weave together Ciboodle's chief strengths -- its process-based customer contact management platform,...

Votigo has debuted a full-fledged social marketing suite that builds around its original core functionality of social promotions. The 6-year-old company is offering a price point that is reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as functionality that can scale to enterprise level fai...

Salesforce.com experienced a global outage early Tuesday, the second major outage in two weeks for the CRM company. Salesforce.com customers in the company's NA1, NA5, NA6, CS0, CS3, CS1 and CS12 regions lost access starting just before 1 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday. Access was restored gradually, ...

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a ven...