Articles by Martin Middlewood

Maine isn't normally considered a hotbed for emerging-technology entrepreneurialism. Yet that's where IntelliCare, a healthcare call center outsourcing company, started in 1997. By 1999, the company had put its Yankee pragmatism to work to create a distributed networking model for telephonic nursing driven by its own clinically based CRM application...

With facilities in 25 states and the District of Columbia, Beverly Enterprises is among the largest providers of eldercare in the U.S. Through its Beverly Healthcare division, it provides 367 skilled nursing homes and 19 assisted living facilities. Ninety of its facilities have Alzheimer's Disease care units The traditional model where patients fin...

For U.S. consumers, this week's big news is that the average price of gas fell below $2 a gallon nationwide -- at least for now. But prices aren't even everywhere in the country. In Mississippi, for example, the AAA says the average price is US$1.94 per gallon. In Southern California, the Automobile Club of California says a gallon of regular averages $2.34.

For the second time in as many years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has slapped a violation for Regulation FD, short for "fair disclosure," on CRM vendor Siebel Systems. The June 29th charge also says that the company violated an SEC cease-and-desist order placed on it for an earlier breach of the same regulation Two of the company's ...

In 1997, Keith Raffel founded UpShot Corporation, the first company to offer Web-based, hosted sales-force automation and CRM. UpShot launched its initial product two years later. By 2003 its products included UpShot for small and midsize businesses and UpShot XE for larger organizations As UpShot was considering growth strategies -- private financ...

On Monday, VeriSign announced the rollout of a new anti-phishing service. Called "Email Security Services," the new offering is designed to dovetail with the VeriSign Intelligence and Control Services to help businesses combat spam, e-mail viruses and phishing, a type of online scam that has become increasingly popular over the past year Phishing a...

Wednesday's salesforce.com IPO offered a rare opportunity for smaller CRM companies to elbow their way into the media spotlight Many of these competitors claimed that they were taking customers away from the now-public company's customer entourage. Because the IPO quiet period extends 25 days past the IPO date, a salesforce.com spokesperson said th...

Hosted CRM vendor salesforce.com made its NYSE debut Wednesday, and got off to a quick start. After announcing its initial public offering of 10 million shares of common stock at US$11 per share, the company's stock soared to around $17 per share by day's end The previous day, salesforce filed a pre-effective amendment with the Securities and Excha...

Like many entrepreneurs, Eliphalet Remington II thought that he could produce something better. So in 1816 he turned to his father's forge at Ilion Gulch, New York and began working on a better rifle. At that time he wasn't worried about supply chains or customer-relationship management. But almost 200 years later, his one-man startup is Remington Arms Company, a US$360 million enterprise selling firearms and other products in over 60 countries.

About three weeks ago, Oracle issued a security alert describing multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities in its E-Business Suite 11i and Applications 11.0. The alert carried the company's highest severity rating, which it associates with a flaw that is "high risk and requires little specialized knowledge to exploit." The alert also warned that any ...

Privately owned EmergeCore Networks announced Thursday that it is shipping a CRM upgrade for its "IT in a Box IT-100" network appliance. The upgrade is free for existing owners of the IT 100, while new purchasers of the IT 100 or future IT in a Box models will also get the CRM software gratis. About the size and shape of a laptop turned on its edg...

After the market closed Tuesday, Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle disclosed that it earned US$990 million, or 19 cents per share, for its fourth fiscal quarter ending May 31st. The company's total revenue rose 9 percent to $3.1 billion during the quarter with its software revenue up 12 percent to $2.5 billion, and services revenue down 4 percent to $558 million. The fourth quarter's operating margin reached an all-time high of 46 percent.

The first week of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) trial against Oracle's US$7.7 billion hostile takeover attempt of PeopleSoft has proven to be as much a high-stakes poker game as the enterprise software market in which the two compete Oracle opened its case with the previously undisclosed Microsoft and SAP merger talks -- dragging both compan...

Hosted CRM vendor RightNow Technologies announced earlier this week that solutions and services provider 170 Systems has deployed RightNow Service to increase the quality, speed and resource-efficiency of its technical support operations Based in Bedford, Massachusetts, 170 Systems provides solutions for Oracle environments that help companies inte...

SAP announced on Wednesday that global brand leader PepsiCo has selected mySAP Business Suite as the primary business platform for unifying its operations, standardizing business processes and increasing efficiency across its divisions. The US$27 billion convenience food and beverage company produces Frito-Lay snacks, Pepsi-Cola beverages, Gatorade sports drinks, Tropicana juices and Quaker foods...

Revelations during the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit to block Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft have caused the world's biggest maker of enterprise software to declare that it is not for sale As part of a willingness to cooperate with the DOJ's case against the merger, Germany-based SAP confirmed yesterday that it did, in fact, eng...

U.S. small- and medium-sized business (SMB) spending on enterprise software reached nearly US$1 billion during 2003, according to a report authored by Access Markets International Partners (AMI). This includes SMB spending on customer-relationship management (CRM), sales-force automation (SFA), enterprise-resource planning (ERP) and supply-chain management (SCM).

Drugstore.com, an online provider of personal care, beauty, health, wellness, vision and pharmacy products, is turning to Kewill Solutions North America to meet its soaring shipping needs Kewill Solutions North America is the shipping management division of Kewill Systems, an international company that develops and sells software and services to ma...

An affiliate of a global acquisitions firm, Platinum Equity, LLC, has agreed to purchase a controlling interest in CompuCom Systems. Safeguard Scientifics, which has a 58 percent voting interest in CompuCom, has agreed to vote for the acquisition The Platinum Equity affiliate will acquire CompuCom for US$4.60 per common share in cash. In addition, ...

In a David-swallows-Goliath merger on a mid-market scale, Cincinnati, Ohio-based Conexio, which has 10 employees, has acquired Dallas, Texas-based Enterprise Computer Solutions (ECS), which has 25 employees. Conexio is one of the top GoldMine partners and ECS one of the top resellers of FrontRange Solutions' Heat, a service management product that includes help desk, knowledge management, asset management and service-level management...