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In the ultimate game of bait-and-switch, several Web sites try to pass off a bot as a bod. That is to say that Live Chat is offered to users, but there's no flesh-and-blood person on the line, there's only a chat bot making a robotic guess at what the user might want to know. Few are fooled by the s...

A CRM consultancy will be launching what it describes as the first CRM Web 2.0 portal for executive recruitment and career development in this industry. Located at myCRMcareer.com, the Web site will be managed by Bruce Culbert, Ted Hartley and Paul Greenberg, principals at BPT Partners. Besides empl...

CentricCRM, a developer of open source CRM aimed at larger enterprises, is set to release an update of its flagship product, CentricCRM 5.0, next month, CEO David Richards told CRM Buyer. "This will be a very significant release for us," he said, pointing to new platform-level support for third part...

Although some people are still trying to enjoy the last of the summer weather, the retail holiday shopping season has begun. With that, inevitably, comes the peak e-mail marketing season. The holiday e-mail season started last year on Sept. 6 with a Christmas reference in a Sam's Club e-mail, accord...

Aspect Software has introduced a series of software modules under one suite aimed at optimization performance in the contact center. The modules are for workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management and coaching and e-learning. Called "Performanc...

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs abruptly announced that the company was cutting the price for the 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399, he appeared to be a bit dismissive of the product's early adopters -- many of whom stood in line for hours to acquire the coveted gadget. Some 24 hours later, though, he was tryi...

My last few columns have been focused on new technologies that are making their way into the broader CRM suite. Expanding the CRM suite has never been easier, as platform vendors like Salesforce.com provide all the capabilities necessary for innovative developers to add something to the ensemble. He...

Salesforce.com has signed a contract to supply 40,000 Web-delivered software subscriptions to Japan Post, bringing the total number of deployments to the company to 45,000. The contract is now the largest seat deployment for the iconic on-demand vendor to date. Japan Post, which is set to be privati...

Dave Duffield, most famously the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday, was giving a keynote presentation at the RightNow user conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., when it hit me. Duffield is about to become a kingmaker in the on-demand market. Please forgive the apparent hyperbole and continue.

Oracle plans to acquire Netsure Telecom, a Dublin, Ireland-based company that provides networking intelligence, analytics and network data integrity software. The company's typical clients include tier one operators of next generation network and service providers such as Vodafone, Cable & Wirel...

As people head off to enjoy the last holiday weekend of the summer, few are thinking about the next stretch of holidays ahead: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah and New Year's. Rest assured, though -- retailers are giving the matter plenty of consideration. Labor Day weekend signals the start of the ...

The pharmaceutical industry has garnered more than its fair share of media attention following headlines exposing the recent Vioxx drug recall, elderly American patients purchasing drugs from Canada, accusations of drug manufacturers price gouging in the face of the AIDS epidemic and Fen-Phen anti-o...

SAP clearly wants an out-of-court settlement of Oracle's suit against it for intellectual property infringement, based on a joint SAP-Oracle case management conference statement filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. In March, Oracle filed suit against SAP and its T...

RightNow continues to build out its multi-channel capabilities with its latest quarterly upgrade, version 8.2. New features in this release include emotion detection and other customer feedback capabilities as well as the ability to turn on certain parts of a knowledge base to the public. "The overa...

SugarCRM has released a beta version of Sugar 5.0, a platform upgrade that provides new development tools and a new Ajax e-mail client, and is based on a new so-called multi-instance on-demand architecture. "This is the largest release in the history of the company's open source project since we fou...