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Video rental purveyor Netflix and TV shopping channel QVC led a customer satisfaction index of the top 100 online retailers released Friday by ForeSee Results. The index, calculated twice a year by the firm, ranked the Web sites of Netflix and QVC, with scores of 85, as the kings of customer satisfa...

Avaya is reportedly negotiating with private equity companies and at least two competitors about selling portions or all of its multifaceted telecom portfolio. Private equity firms are dazzled by Avaya's $6 billion cash flow and low debt levels. Silver Lake, a private equity firm that specializes in...

What should companies do -- and what should they refrain from doing -- when reacting to blog postings about their products or services? Robert Cox, president of the New York-based Media Bloggers Association and a consultant to consumer packaged goods companies, has very specific ideas on the subject...

A miracle year comes along very rarely, though any single year could be one depending on the subject matter. For example, as a member of Red Sox nation, 2004 will always be a miracle year for me, because my team won the World Series after 86 years of futility -- the Cubs are still waiting for their...

Oracle has taken what it deemed to be the best CRM features from Siebel 8 and PeopleSoft 9, as well as some of its own native functionality, and incorporated them into its latest E-Business Suite release, version 12. "There have been improvements made across all three applications," Mike Betzer, vic...

Salesforce.com and Google clearly hold each other in high esteem. Just how deep that mutual admiration runs is suggested by news that the two companies are working through details of a potential partnership. Possible developments from the reported tie-up could be a Web-based tool for integrating Goo...

Checkpoint Systems earlier this month rolled out a line of RFID-enabled labels with both advanced inventory control and item-tracking capabilities. The Thorofare, N.J.-based company said the dual-purpose label will help retailers consolidate their use of radio frequency identification technology. Ch...

Interactive Intelligence has introduced a mobile offering that duplicates many of the IP telephony functions available to workers on their desktop phones. Interaction Client, Mobile Edition provides users with presence management; company directory look-up; Microsoft Outlook contact access; call con...

If you want to see who's winning at retaining and attaining higher-than-ever customer loyalty, look no further than what is really happening inside sales reps, call center reps, their managers, and for that matter, their CEO. What is it? It's nothing on the outside -- while a new CRM system on a ho...

ValueAct Capital and Silver Lake, which focuses on large-scale investments in technology-driven growth industries, will purchase 100 percent of the outstanding equity interests in Acxiom in an all-cash transaction valued at $3 billion, which includes the assumption of approximately $756 million of d...

Private equity heavyweight the Blackstone Group is taking another publicly traded software company private. It has announced it will purchase Alliance Data Systems for $7.8 billion, including the assumption of certain debt, or $81.75 per share in cash. That is a premium of 30 percent over the $62.96...

Oracle has entered the product lifecycle management niche with a flourish through its acquisition of best-of-breed vendor Agile Software. While there are other active PLM vendors, Agile offers a difficult-to-replicate line of products and functionality that address product innovation and the introdu...

It has taken some time to assemble the ingredients, but the CRM industry is finally poised to deliver robust mobile offerings. If you think you've heard this before, that's because you have -- in 2004, in 2005 and, yes, last year as well. To be sure, there are mobile CRM apps available on the market...

Salesforce.com continues to carve its user base -- and prospective user base -- into finer and finer niches, which it then targets with new products. The rollout of the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com exemplifies that strategy. Salesforce.com introduced a contact center application w...

RightNow Technologies has introduced its third industry vertical and appears to be poised to introduce a fourth -- in Consumer Goods Products -- in the near future. Thus far, the company has focused on industry groups in which it has a strong expertise and a large number of clients, such as higher e...