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Most health insurance companies have plowed resources into self-service Web sites for their policyholders -- Web site portals that display page after page of details on coverage. Yet the general perception, even among many industry insiders, is that health insurance providers are not customer-friend...

SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications. The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the ad...

SAP and Research In Motion are partnering to develop a mobile CRM application. The first output of this venture will be a native BlackBerry smartphone client that links SAP CRM with BlackBerry applications such as Email, Address Book and Calendar. To be precise, they are developing a native RIM clie...

SugarCRM has released version 5.1 of its open source CRM platform, building on functionality it debuted in last year's milestone 5.0 release, which included new development tools, a new Ajax e-mail client, and a new multi-instance on-demand architecture. Among the new features in version 5.1 are enh...

The customer relationship management industry will grow by 14.2 percent this year, Gartner forecasts in a new report, with revenue expected to surpass $8.9 billion. Last year, the CRM industry registered $7.8 billion in global sales, based on preliminary revenue figures. The market is expected to co...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

It's official. With the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft is now formally a player -- a big one -- in the online CRM space. The general availability release seems almost anticlimactic, given that so many of its features and functions are the same as those in Dynamics C...

The big CRM news of the week was Salesforce.com's tie-up with Google to embed its CRM application in the search engine provider's productivity suite. Plenty in the industry were wowed by the development -- not all, though. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu can be counted among the latter. Zoho is an on-demand ...

Etelos has released a limited beta that provides access to offline data -- a chief requirement for any on-demand vendor. The feature, called "Apps on a Plane," allows any browser-based application from the Etelos Marketplace to exchange data with any other AOP-enabled app. Last year, the firm announ...

If you are in London on April 24th, you might want to check out the next monthly VRM Hub meeting. What is VRM, you wonder? For starters, VRM, or vendor relationship management, is the brainchild of Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Project VRM is a ...

Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition fe...

Much ink has been spilled about what, exactly, has been the secret of Barack Obama's overwhelming success. There is no denying his charisma or the appeal of his message, but a behind-the-scenes look at how his political machine operates -- namely, how it empowers its people on the ground to operate ...

IBM is unveiling upgrades to its WebSphere Premises Server at Impact, its SOA event taking place in Las Vegas this week. The buffed-up SOA software -- Version 6.1 -- and IBM's RFID Information Center will be the two main product spotlights at the event. The cumulative effect of the improvements is t...

Oracle has gone to the debt markets to fund its $8.5 billion purchase of BEA Systems. The company has priced an offering in three series of investment-grade notes for a total of $5 billion. It is selling $1.25 billion of 4.95 percent notes due 2013; $2.5 billion of 5.75 percent notes due 2018; and $...

SAP has signaled its intention to hand the leadership reins to board member and deputy chief executive Leo Apotheker, naming him as co-CEO to serve alongside current chief Henning Kagermann, whose contract expires in 13 months. SAP has traditionally groomed its chief executives in this manner. Kager...

HP has released a number of new offerings targeting the mid-market, including new Linux management tools, remote security access products and -- for companies embarking on a customer relationship management implementation -- two new additions to the HP ProLiant server line that include configuration...

A network intrusion at Advance Auto Parts has put the credit card, debit card and checking account information of up to 56,000 customers in jeopardy. Data security at 14 stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia and New York, has been compromised, according to the...

You would think, based on blogosphere chatter, that Starbucks invented Web 2.0. The company's introduction of My Starbucks Idea last month has inspired numerous bloggers -- some who make it their business to follow Web 2.0, some who could care less about the space -- to post about the new site. Basi...

SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and i...

As an executive at Callidus Software, Chris Cabrera was frustrated at the mid-market deals he often had to leave at the wayside. There were firms that basically could not afford Callidus' on-premise incentive compensation software, nor the integration and implementation costs that would accompany su...