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Mobile everything is the current computing zeitgeist and if that means turning an app or function that is perfectly suited for desktop use into a mobilized one, well, as the thinking goes at so many companies now, just do it. However, mobilizing an app -- even a front-office CRM app -- should not be...

It has been a busy three years for Bonitasoft. Since its launch, the company has: 1) commercialized its open source business process management technology, which it created out of the Bonita Project in the mid-2000s; 2) pulled in $28 million in venture funding; and 3) attracted some 600 customers, i...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many....

Salesforce.com has made its biggest acquisition ever: The company has snagged marketing automation and campaign management vendor ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. As part of the transaction, Salesforce will acquire all outstanding ExactTarget stock for $33.75 per share in cash. Both companies' boards o...

I seem to be doing a lot of research and writing about Big Data this year. I am taking a lot of briefings from emerging analytics companies too, and I see it all as net good because the emphasis on data and analytics is really an emphasis on information, an economic indicator of sorts for me. The th...

BigContacts has unveiled a new iteration of its CRM application. BigContacts 2.0 is a full-featured CRM suite "that is couched in a simple and easy-to-use format," said founder and CEO Bob Walton. That is a point of pride for the company. "We have taken the pillars of what a CRM system needs and mad...

Siebel saved my life. Not really but sort of. By the early 1990s, I had been selling software for what seemed like a lifetime and dealing with the typical frustrations of life in sales. There weren't enough leads, and there was always more work to do than you could squeeze into a day. I kept records...

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny ti...

The case for mobile CRM is an easy one to make. Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and the way most people work requires 24-7 accessibility. Not being tethered to a desktop to access customer records is also a plus, if not an outright necessity in some cases. However, as we discussed in part 1 of this ...