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It wasn't so long ago that the chief technology officer was sequestered in the IT department, cut off for all intents and purposes from the hub of enterprise power. It is different now, of course: The CTO position has grown in visibility over the last 10 years and become more closely tied to that of...

There were approximately 40 million women among the 90 million people watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, and Pats fan Andrea Learned was one of them. The night was a letdown for Learned the sports fan -- but not for Learned the marketer and author. This year's Super Bowl ads are illustrative of a fo...

Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that la...

As social media become more embedded in our lives, tragedies like the Megan Meier case -- the Missouri teenager killed herself after a fictitious friend invented by the mother of a neighborhood girl left nasty messages on her MySpace profile -- may be the inevitable fallout. Corporate Web 2.0 usage...

ATG is building out its personalization feature set with the $10 million acquisition of best-of-breed vendor CleverSet. It is the first acquisition the company has made since its $48.3 million eStara deal in 2006. CleverSet is an automated personalization engine delivered in Software as a Service mo...

Optimizing the value of customer data and respecting customers' privacy are two immutable and opposing forces that companies always try to balance -- usually unsuccessfully. Few for-profit firms have proven themselves able to avoid challenging the privacy boundary when captivated by the lure of data...

Alltel has joined the ranks of service providers offering mobile CRM functionality to their business customers. The wireless company has introduced SalesNOW, a contact, activity and deal management Web app designed for the BlackBerry mobile device. Most of the application's features relate to contac...

On the heels of Oracle's successful bid to acquire BEA Systems, SAP has unveiled the first wave of products developed through its own $6.78 billion acquisition of Business Objects last year. It has also revealed more details about its plans to integrate its product suite with the French business int...

Salesforce.com has introduced a set of new tools with a pricing model designed to encourage adoption of its Force.com Platform as a Service product introduced last year. One of the new entries is Force.com Cloud Computing architecture, which can be purchased on a per-login basis. "The concept of clo...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specif...

B2B integration provider Extol International has introduced a middleware application aimed at the upper midmarket. Business Extenders, a subset of its main product line, Extol Business Integrator, is designed to address one-off pain points in the IT environment: a sales manager's inability to see th...

Three months after BEA Systems rejected its first unsolicited offer of $6.7 billion, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring the middleware and business process management vendor after all -- for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share. That's a 14 percent premium over its first bid and a 24 percent pr...

CRM is all about the front office and those processes that affect or touch the customer. After 15-plus years of software development aimed at this space, you might think that there's nothing left to be said -- or, more precisely, done. You'd be wrong. Dick Lee, principal of High-Yield Methods and w...

Oracle's steady march to integrate its string of multimillion-dollar acquisitions continues. Its latest meld is the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 application with the Oracle Customer Hub, with Fusion middleware serving as the common platform. The end result is a CRM enterprise suite with master data m...

On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog. "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you s...

Return on investment figures for a Software as a Service implementation can be surprisingly difficult to generalize. One measure often cited in the industry is that one year is a reasonable period in which firms can expect to see a project deliver returns, with the larger-sized investments bringing ...

2006 was the last year e-commerce vendors introduced new functionality to their Web sites that were visible to consumers, such as better search features and click-once-to-buy shopping carts. Coincidentally or not, it was also the last time aggregate customer satisfaction with online retailers regist...

It is difficult to avoid the talk of a potential recession in 2008. Even firms whose product set or market niche are well-suited for tight times don't like the thought of slow sales and bleak economic forecasts. RightNow Technologies, an established Software as a Service CRM vendor, is one of those ...

John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM, is no stranger to the proprietary software that delivers most of the CRM functionality in the market today. The Washington, D.C.-native moved to Silicon Valley in his twenties and spent 12 years in the "trenches" as he puts it, developing products for ente...

Now general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Brad Wilson's career trajectory has allowed him to deliver CRM to the market from many different vantage points -- and levels of resources. Wilson began at HP as a database software architect, moving into product management and marketing after a few yea...