Vendors

I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. A quick glance a couple of weeks ago...

A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By p...

Avaya is targeting unmet pockets of user demand in the telecom industry with the release of three new offerings this week. Kevin Kennedy, who will be taking over as CEO in January, is appearing at VoiceCon on Monday to unveil the new products: a contact center product focused on outbound messaging a...

Not that it's a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. After Oracle OpenWorld, I made the observation that Siebel appeared to be returning to its old prominence. The introduction of new products based on W...

Oracle introduced a new collaborative platform called "Beehive" at OpenWorld last week. To be sure, it was hardly the only announcement the enterprise software vendor made -- but it did serve as grist for many bloggers. Oracle is basically jumping on a bandwagon in the collaboration space, said Davi...

As Wall Street unwound last week, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte watched from a vantage point an ocean away. He was in London, making a stop on his self-assigned global tour to visit the company's top 50 users. Like many people, Gianforte is viewing the events with a combination of uncertainty and cau...

Oracle OpenWorld wasn't a day old before Twitter-like blog posts began peppering the Internet. Mike Gotta from the Burton Group posted notes encapsulating his essential gleanings from Charles Phillip's keynote. Paul Greenberg was equally terse in his posts, which numbered at least five by the middle...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social netw...

When one company is ousted from the S&P 500 index, another one is added to keep the number at 500. The most recent losers in this game of musical chairs are, for obvious reasons, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Effective Sept. 12, these mortgage giants will be replaced by Fastenal and Salesforce.com...

Four months out of the gate, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has been updated with Web 2.0 functionality to support Internet marketing campaigns, as well as other activities. The new features allow users to create and manage online and search engine campaigns; research and bid on keywords using search...

CRM users have been waiting for a viable mobile CRM market ecosystem to develop for years. To be sure, the industry tantalizes users with news that this or that vendor or offering or solution will herald mainstream application of this technology. For the most part, though, it hasn't happened yet, sa...

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about t...

Some of your employees have a blog -- approved, of course -- as do some of your customers. In addition, your employees have been posting videos from the latest trade show on your Web site, as well as on some of your partner Web sites. Your latest project is the funneling of customer comments from yo...

SAP turned in a strong Q2 financial report on Tuesday with results mitigated only by a drop in profits due to its acquisition of Business Objects. SAP's net profit for the quarter was $634.9 million, a 9 percent decline from the same period last year. Revenue was $4.45 billion, a jump of 18 percent ...

One best practice forward-looking companies have adopted is being proactive with online conversations that criticize, question -- or hopefully compliment -- a company's products or services. Not enough companies do this, of course, and of those that do, most do it more out of curiosity than anything...