Customer Relationship Management - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Salesforce.com at turning point as Dreamforce begins

  Salesforce.com enters this year's Dreamforce conference riding a wave of rapid growth and increasing technological breadth, but much work remains ahead of it, analysts say.

• CRM: Four dirty little secrets of marketing automation

  In the heat of a sales cycle, marketing automation vendors tell you all the great news about how their systems will increase conversion rates, improve sales effectiveness, and save time. When used properly, marketing automation systems do all that. What the sales reps don't tell you is...

• Startup offers 'virtual private SaaS' for Salesforce.com

  Startup Navajo Systems is targeting Salesforce.com customers who face regulatory hurdles involving data privacy and cloud computing with a new service it calls Virtual Private SaaS (software as a service).

• Salesforce.com names its first chief scientist

  Salesforce.com has named JP Rangaswami, formerly chief scientist of BT Group, to a newly created position of the same name, the company said Wednesday.

• HP may shut out Oracle with Salesforce deal

  HP is reportedly set to sign a major deal with Salesforce, replacing the Oracle CRM systems it runs.

• The CRM reality distortion field

  Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying marketing guy for 20 years. So when I see the effects of reality distortion in my clients' purchase decisions, I know whereof I speak.

• Verizon Business service adds mobile device toolkit

  Verizon Business today announced a hosted service to help customers develop and deploy applications such as CRM software across multiple devices such as the iPhone, Symbian, Windows Phone 7 and, soon, Android.

• Startup wants to be OpenTable for services firms

  Startup GramercyOne is taking an on-demand scheduling and CRM application first created for spas into a number of other verticals, in hopes of becoming the equivalent of restaurant-reservations hub OpenTable for services businesses.

• Use CRM to crowd-source your product strategy

  Product strategy needs to be a mix of engineering/operations plan and market survey, but most market survey techniques are quite vulnerable to big procedural and statistical problems.

• Stupid data corruption tricks: Take our CRM quiz

  In the spirit of David Letterman's occasional feature "Stupid People Tricks," I thought it was time to summarise common errors that can lead to corrupted CRM records, or worse. How much worse? Read on.

• Oracle buys Art Technology Group for $1 billion

  Oracle announced Tuesday that it plans to buy e-commerce vendor Art Technology Group for about $US1 billion. The deal is expected to be completed early next year.

• The App Store effect on BI applications and IT

  Of the many consequential effects of the "App Store" phenomenon, there is one staring down IT departments today: Not only does your average consumer now expect application selection, purchase and delivery to be pretty darn seamless, so too does your smartphone-toting knowledge worker and line-of-business manager.

• Informatica teams with Cloudera to ease Hadoop use

  Informatica has modified its business intelligence software so that it can work with Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, the two companies announced Monday.

• 27 things you need to know about Oracle, SAP and HP

  The last month has seen a blur of activity in Oracle's corporate theft lawsuit against SAP, which goes to trial in a California district court on Monday morning. SAP has conceded some misdeeds, Oracle has made a meal of it in the press, and HP has somehow been dragged into the kerfuffle. Here's what you need to know to understand what's going on with Oracle, SAP, HP and that now defunct company called TomorrowNow.

• Why CRM data trumps CRM systems

  At last month's CIO Forum in San Francisco, I lead a round-table discussion about the strategic way to think about CRM applications and their evolution in the enterprise. While everyone agreed that the most comprehensive CRM systems were built (actually, assembled), not bought, one CIO took it a step further. What really matters in a CRM system isn't the system at all. It's the data.