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New research by threat detection and response firm Vectra AI shows that the most common threats to corporate networks remain consistent throughout all companies -- regardless of their size. Researchers calculated the relative frequency of threat detections that were triggered during a three-month sp...

Cybercriminals are deliberately targeting phones, tablets, and Chromebooks to increase their odds of finding a vulnerable entry point. The Financial Services Threat Report from Lookout disclosed that 20 percent of mobile banking customers had a trojanized app on their devices when trying to sign int...

Various CRM vendors have been issuing interesting survey results from the pandemic that purport to show the "new normal" in full flower. Salesforce did so recently, and now Oracle is getting into the act. While the data generated from these and many other surveys is interesting, and drives much disc...

The big questions about reopening the global economy and what new moves portend are coming in for analysis. It's not yet clear what the new normal is -- and there are more than a few straws in the wind that suggest that fixing one problem might cause another. This entire discussion before us isn't r...

Phone and email, traditionally the most common ways of contacting customer service, are being used less and less by consumers as digital channels rise in popularity.

The software industry fueled jobs and GDP growth in the United States in 2020, according to a report by Software.org: the BSA Foundation. The software industry supported more than 15.8 million jobs in 2020. While the largest concentrations of software jobs remain in traditional tech hubs, such as Wa...

A recent study by Kaspersky revealed that nearly one quarter of PCs still run Microsoft Windows 7, which stopped receiving mainstream support in January 2020. Using an end-of-life operating system that no longer receives security updates is akin to driving a car with a brake light on, suggested Oli...

INSIGHTS

Three-Part Evolution

I've been writing about the importance of platform as a tool and as a strategy for a while -- and not only with regard to Salesforce. I'd say most CRM vendors have a platform story; others like Oracle and Zoho come up as examples all the time. The difference with Salesforce is that it's looking bey...

Customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million per year. Retailers need to avoid the expensive mistakes that result in such disastrous churn. This presents a clamorous alarm to marketers. One solution to this costly predicament is to get sales teams to work effectively, an...

The notorious Emotet botnet software began uninstalling itself from some one million computers Sunday. The uninstall command was part of an update sent to the infected computers by law enforcement servers in the Netherlands after Emotet's infrastructure was compromised in January during a multinatio...

Many digital marketers spend too much on targeting an already loyal customer base rather than tapping into new streams. Dr. Jorge Barraza, professor of applied psychology at the University of Southern California, has a plan to help advertisers reach consumers that would not normally buy their produc...

INSIGHTS

Newslettering vs. Blogging

Newsletters have become popular over the last few years; and especially over the past year during you-know-what when in-person meetings were taboo. Many companies are trying to figure out how to best leverage them, and new software platforms make it increasingly easy to produce one or more. What int...

This year's revised federal tax code plus new Covid-19 initiatives provide additional incentives for startup companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses. If you received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan, you may qualify to have that indebtedness forgiven; and other tax incentives...

Jonathan Cran, founder and CEO of Intrigue, a cybersecurity startup based in Austin, Texas, used his company's network security tools to compile a list of Fortune 500 companies still exposed to last month's Microsoft Exchange breach. Potentially, many of those companies may not know their networks a...

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