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CDC Software has upgraded its sales module, Pivotal Sales Force Automation, with enhancements that the company developed by borrowing from the best practices it observed in its clients, said Ehab Samy, director of product management for CRM applications. In addition, it rolled out these upgrades th...

Applications delivered as Software as a Service are great. They allow businesses to scale their operations, reduce up-front costs, relieve themselves of tasks like backups and software updates, and speed up deployment of applications. They're simple to implement (in most cases). But, oddly, I think ...

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, ...

The more we invest in something, the more committed we are to a successful outcome. Obvious enough, but what this investment of time and effort means is that we are now more motivated to follow through on our initial interest in the form of action. Enticing your shoppers to stay on your site and e...

Fast-growing Jive Software offers businesses an extensible social business solution that integrates social networking, collaboration software, community software and social media monitoring across the entire enterprise. The company recently bolstered its board of directors with a number of executive...

One of the great promises of the social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. There's a gulf between small businesses, which may speak or eve...

SugarCRM made enhancements in four areas in the Sugar 6 Spring 2011 release: CRM made global, CRM made mobile, CRM made social, and Sugar as a platform. SugarCRM will also work more on integration with IBM's Lotus family of products. Its acquisition of iExtensions could move its Lotus integration ro...

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer car...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of o...

A new breed of consumer has emerged. This new breed -- the social consumer -- is more connected, more vocal and has greater control. Social consumers use social media to voice their praises about a particular business, but they use social media just as frequently to voice their concerns and anger a...

Configure/Price/Quote tools provide companies technology-enabled processes by which selling organizations manage their opportunity-to-order methodology with automated tools that impact the speed and accuracy of developing quotes, proposals, contracts and products. As sales organizations endeavor to ...

Recently, a customer was using the Navy Federal Credit Union ATM and encountered some difficulty with his account. He whipped out his mobile device and tweeted to the world that he was having problems. You can probably guess what happened next: He received a return tweet shortly afterward. However, ...

The online shopping cart has become as much of a wish list as anything, giving consumers a place to store, compare, consider and dream about potential purchases. E-tailers, however, would like to see those potential purchases become actual ones, and they're coming up with increasingly sophisticated ...

Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other onli...

Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recentl...