Spotlight Features

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...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

A wireless expert I met on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago told me that more than 58 percent of people don't even know the brand of cell phone they use, and it made me wonder what else we don't know about wireless. More important, is that a good or a bad thing? I usually loath splitting ...

Asked to define CRM, most enterprise executives will tell you it's the process of moving a company from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one. Since customers ultimately write your paycheck, it's not hard to see why enterprises have embraced this concept and the technology to enable it.

After a long period in which there seemed to be little to report, PRM or partner relationship management, appears to be enjoying an upswing. PRM was an unfortunate fellow traveler with all the other 'RM' permutations that came about in the dot-com bubble. There was also eCRM, which was a distincti...

With the CRM vendor landscape going through so many changes today, it's an excellent time to check up and see what your vendor's viability is, what their future prospects look like, and especially for the best-of-breed vendors, what their exit strategy is, if they have one. I have compiled some quic...

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Righ...

In buying a U.S. company, liabilities do not cease once a seller has completed a deal. The allocation of liabilities is usually determined in the acquisition agreement. Acquisition agreements are described in the previous article in this series. The role of indemnifications in mergers and acquisi...

Business intelligence applications have always delighted company executives -- at least as they watched simulated exercises on a sales rep's laptop. Real-world execution, though? Until recently, that has left much to be desired. To be sure, it is not entirely the fault of the vendor. Earlier generat...

For many manufacturers, indirect channels provide the majority of their revenue yet carry only a small percentage of their most profitable products. Instead, indirect channel partners opt to move literally tons of low-margin items, competing in the marketplace on price and availability alone. The el...

Walk into a typical command center and what do you see? A wall or desktop filled with multiple screens reporting statistics from a number of disparate systems. Details from a leading-edge workforce management solution are prominently displayed on one screen, stats from the ACD are on another monitor...

Earlier this month, Aprimo released Marketing 7.5, a milestone for the company in many respects. It is the first release that incorporates Ensemble, a product acquired from DoubleClick, and it provides business-to-consumer campaign management capability for the first time. Marketing 7.5 is also the ...

Two things hit the wires this week relative to CRM that I think are interesting events, and in some ways they go beyond the on-demand space. Salesforce.com announced its partner relationship management solution, and NetSuite said it will sell its product in a retail configuration. At first NetSuit...

Implementing a Web Analytics Solution for your site can be fraught with all kinds of peril, but knowing what you're in for goes a long way toward avoiding the biggest headaches, as Part 1 of this two-part series points out. Part 2 continues the discussion of effective ways to deal with potential pro...

By definition Search Engine Marketing refers to both paid search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The former is based on a pay-per-click advertising model as companies bid on specific search terms or in the case of Google, AdWords, to get a more visible placement within search engine results.