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Contact centers will dramatically increase the adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol technology over the next few years, the Yankee Group projects. This long-awaited development will be driven in some part by related growth in the number of home agents. The VoIP adoption rate in North American co...

Sprint has entered the hosted contact center space, a submarket that is rapidly expanding, with the introduction of an IP-based offering that is powered by Avaya technology. It is Sprint's first toll-free VoIP product, Barry Tishgart, director of product marketing, told CRM Buyer. "We have always su...

First it was support for e-mail marketing, then it was a user interface that displayed real time system data -- also known as the "Dashboard." Now the latest must-have feature in on-demand CRM, at least as evidenced by two separate offerings, is paid search. Both NetSuite and Salesforce.com have in...

Accessing the Internet in India can be a major problem, discovered Akiba Stern, a partner with New York-based Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, on a recent visit to an outsourcing service provider's facilities there. It wasn't that the firm's connectivity services were poor. Rather, its security processe...

SplendidCRM has created what it says is the ideal "compile once, run everywhere" cross-platform application with its release of SplendidCRM 1.2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SplendidCRM 1.1 for Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. The company used Novell's Mono open source toolset to lev...

More companies are viewing the Software as a Service model as a viable delivery option for functions beyond CRM -- the area in which it has probably developed the greatest traction -- according to a new study by Aberdeen. SaaS implementation times and ROI cycles are growing shorter in such areas as...

Oracle has released the next version of PeopleSoft's CRM application, version 9, fulfilling a promise made to PeopleSoft customers concerned over Oracle's acquisition of the vendor. Included in the new release, according to Doris Wong, vice president and general manager for PeopleSoft Enterprise pro...

Not long ago, if a company wanted to outsource non-core operations -- such as contact center or back office processes -- India was the locale to choose. End of story. That was then, though. Over the last few years, markets around the world -- as well as the outsourcing industry itself -- have evolve...

Software systems -- from off-the-shelf applications to enterprise suites -- have become easier to use and implement, consultant Stephen Kerr is the first to admit. That relative ease of implementation is obvious from the end-user's perspective, at any rate. Does that mean that systems integration of...

Loyalty Lab, an on-demand CRM application for consumer brands, has introduced Loyalty 2.0, an upgraded product to help retailers and grocery stores incorporate e-commerce channels into their first-generation loyalty programs, and to better segment their customers. It is part of the summer 2006 relea...

Wincor Nixdorf, a German-based provider of IT applications for the banking and retail industries, has introduced its eServices platform in the United States for the first time. Bits and pieces of the application, which connects Wincor Nixdorf service management with customers via an electronic netw...

As senior director of product marketing for the identity practice at Sun Microsystems, Rob Beauchamp remembers -- and it was not that long ago -- when integration was considered a tactical process with the objective of knitting together systems and applications as quickly as possible. To be sure, th...

Earlier this year, IBM announced that its joint sales revenues with mid-market independent software vendors (ISVs) reached US$1 billion worldwide. This is just one measure of the success IBM has realized in the SMB partner strategy it launched in 2002, finds a new report by Access Markets Internatio...

Increasingly, healthcare and financial services firms are investigating contact center applications that offer biometric security features -- specifically voice authentication -- as a way to meet new regulatory demands, according to one company active in this area. "The speaker verification market h...

FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then. This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interfa...

When designing a Web page, where exactly should one place the icon to let the consumer know Live Chat is available? On the home page? In the service section? Should that icon be flashing? What color should it be? Believe or not, a group of executives spent at least half an hour of earnest conversati...

Governments are turning to private sector techniques -- namely benchmarking -- to ensure that their back-office processes meet industry performance standards, according to a new study by Accenture. The resulting savings are, at least in theory, being applied to constituent-facing processes. "We know...

Assemble Connect may be a small company -- but because it is a distributor of custom-manufactured products, its operations are complex enough to rival the largest of manufacturers. That means just about every aspect of its business must be customized -- down to the software that manages the operatio...

Microsoft traditionally has focused on building industry-generic productivity, communications and collaborative software. Now, though, the company appears to be heading down a path well trodden -- for better or worse -- by such companies as Siebel, SAP and a host of best-of-breed vendors: the softwa...

The high level of mergers and acquisitions in the CRM market will continue through 2008, research firm Gartner predicts, with one in three CRM software vendors involved in such a transaction each year. There has already been a series of very high profile M&As in the space, of course, including O...