Vendors

Business Intelligence has evolved considerably in the last several years. At one time the domain of PhDs or other highly trained employees, it has become accessible to the masses. Indeed, one of the competitive differentiators among the vendors in the market -- from the huge stack players to the sma...

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level. I was there and got a sense of change happening. It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the im...

Today's column is a little different from the usual fare. Beagle Research Group has once again recognized a handful of companies with its annual WizKids award, this time for their innovations in front office computing. The idea behind the award -- and a report that goes with it -- is that innovati...

Consona offers a line of enterprise resource management and customer relationship management software that is made up of parts that are more recognizable than the whole. Remember Onyx? It belongs to Consona. Same with Knova and, more recently, SupportSoft. Over the last few years, Consona has been s...

I was surprised by the mini-storm that blew up over Salesforce's apparent decision to charge ISVs, SIs and other types of developers for support using their development environment. Two primary arguments have cropped up -- one that support ought to be free, and the other that it's hard to make mone...

Mission-critical IT investments are inherently risky, even with a certified project management professional in place to guide the project. Factors like unrealistic timelines and poor planning can certainly jeopardize project success -- but could these factors be symptoms of a larger issue? Perhaps ...

Tigerpaw Software is a family-owned software company that, 24 years after it was founded, is about to enter a new phase of growth. The company's enterprise CRM, inventory and project management platform has always had a loyal following, in no small part because of the care and attention Tigerpaw lav...

Before the arrival of sales force automation and marketing campaign software, there were productivity applications. CRM, as we all know, rose from that fundamental platform of email, calendaring, mailing list management and task management. A lot of CRM vendors include productivity in their CRM apps...

Zuora, the on-demand billing service for on-demand companies, is turning 1 year old. Last week, the company announced 100 product improvements with its 2.0 version and said that it had attracted 100 customers in its first year. Why all the attention to this startup? I think what's cool about Zuora...

PRM has an intriguing business case: It applies the concepts and tools of customer relationship management to the business relationships that also affect a company's customer base. The problem with PRM is that it hasn't caught on -- for myriad reasons, starting with its expense and difficulty in imp...

Around the time when Software as a Service was pre-empting the on-premise vendors, SugarCRM burst onto the CRM scene with its own disruptive business mode: open source for CRM. The build-it-yourself model wasn't for everybody, of course -- or so many thought at the time. As SugarCRM continues to ref...

The Business Intelligence space has been on a mission for several years. The goal: to simplify the way these applications work for the end-user. Several years ago, one practically needed a Ph.D. to be able to eke out usable data. Today, most line of business users can get the same results. Noetix is...

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

Two of the biggest names in CRM had trade shows recently. Oracle and Microsoft each held customer conventions in the same week, but the two could not have been more different. Microsoft attracted thousands of customers, partners, employees and press to New Orleans for Convergence, one of its big ann...

Having joined the business software company in 1996, George Klaus, chairman, president and CEO of Epicor, is hardly a newbie by industry standards. However, he tells CRM Buyer that all of his executive team has been with the company even longer -- long enough, in other words, to have weathered sever...