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Recession. Nine letters you never want to see together in one word; at least not in that order. Sales and marketing departments across the globe are reeling from one of the worst financial crisis in recent business. The stock market is down, unemployment is climbing, and businesses are bracing fo...

Oracle continued its fast-following ways last week when it introduced additional functionality for Oracle On-Demand Release 16. The statement completed a two-part announcement begun the week before and brings to eight the number of new on-demand CRM applications from the company. The products annou...

Earlier this month Zuora, a startup that's less than a year old, launched Z-Commerce, a platform that gives developers access to its applications as well as Z-Force's API documentation, sample code and toolkits. There is also a sandbox environment, currently available in private beta. A few years ag...

When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn't -- as one might assume in this economy -- mean it in a bad way. In January, the company acquired Centive, its primary competitor. In Februa...

Growing up in a world immersed in digital technologies, members of Generation Y have the highest of expectations on how they want to interact with their banks online. Born at the dawn of the digital age in the early 1980s, the oldest among Generation Y have never known a world without personal compu...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

The recession is ahead of our thinking about how to sell around it. Our first response is a tried and true strategy that is not right for all occasions. People will disagree with me, but so far we've seen a steady stream of one idea -- staying close to the customer and attending to the customer expe...

Software as a Service has become the business and software delivery model of choice among new vendors -- not to mention companies seeking to invest in IT. Surprisingly, considering the model's growing market share, few companies have sprung up to offer SaaS applications for the providers themselves....

Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down. Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Deman...

It should come as no surprise that Maurice Ramirez -- an emergency room attending physician with Florida Hospital's Flagler division -- is in favor of widespread adoption of automated personal health records, or PHRs. Ramirez was once chief medical officer for a company that was developing such an a...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in. I write a lot ...

Genesys has always been a distinct entity within the Alcatel-Lucent line of divisions, products and services. On Jan. 1, though, it was folded into a larger group called the "Applications Software Group." Genesys' mission of offering contact center products and services geared toward enterprises and...

For the last few years, Amdocs has been introducing modules, or "packs," to customers. These are packaged applications that are equipped with features that address a specific task or functional area and are designed for fast implementation. This strategy was on display last week when Amdocs rolled o...

Among the new tools and features SugarCRM introduced at its global developer conference this week are a new Web services framework and mobile customizations. The open source customer relationship management company also reiterated its support for the cloud, with the rollout of several additional c...