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Technological development is fueling the transformation of economies and production processes around the world. Just-in-time manufacturing -- an industry-shaking innovation when Japanese manufacturers applied the methodology on a wholesale basis back in the early 1980s -- is now a best practice acro...

CosmoCom has upgraded its IP-based contact center software platform to version 5. Called CosmoCall Universe, the system has been enhanced to address multiple contact center channels in a unified fashion, according to Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president of CosmoCom. It also improved functionalit...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo, the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year. This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as t...

If you asked each member of your sales team what problem your company solves, what value you provide, and how you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, would their answers be clear, consistent and compelling? Most likely, you would receive a range of inconsistent responses. Today's salespe...

There is no limit, it seems, to what financial institutions are willing to spend to ensure that their customers' money is safe. The latest twist? Biometric safeguards, such as voice imprints or iris scans. To be sure, this technology already exists and is used in all sorts of high-end applications.

Sage Software this week purchased financial services compliance and document tracking technology from VerticalFalls, in order to expand Sage's ACT product family. This is the second vertical market that ACT has targeted; earlier this year, the company released ACT for Real Estate. The new acquisitio...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

New wired and wireless Web services are improving supply chain and B2B2C network management at both ends of the chain. As companies such as Ariba and IBM are hard at work extending supply chain and B2B network management with new and improved SOA-based Web services at the partner and customer end, w...

Sales executives have long embraced the vision of leveraging incentive compensation to drive performance within their sales teams. In this vision commissions are the reward, the proverbial carrot used to motivate reps to achieve and exceed specific revenue and performance metrics. However, the gap b...

Demographic information is the most common type of information gathered from your customers, and today ranges from basic information such as name and address to age, education, profession, hobbies, pets, and virtually any type of factual attribute. The more you know about your customers' profiles, t...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures gam...

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems. Features include ConnectOut, an on-demand outbound messaging application program interface; ConnectOracle, which integrate...

Perhaps a savvy political operative tasked with designing the best go-to-market campaign for service-oriented architecture would proclaim: "It's the applications, stupid!" Focusing on the applications -- and not the means to achieving them -- has served computing well over the decades. I recall tryi...

No longer having to hear that "CRM is dead" is one thing to be thankful for, says Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. That was a talking point making the rounds a few years back, and it developed sudden and significant traction when it was echoed by an executive of one of the lea...

When the Internet burst upon the scene in the early 1990s, the concept of software as a service seemed an idea whose time had come. It got hyped along with everything else about the Internet and reached a massive peak of inflated expectations in early 2000, as venture capitalists funded dozens of ne...