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Microsoft Dynamics Update Promises 'CRM Anywhere'
Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabilities," said Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's product management group.
crmbuyer.com | 06-Feb-2012 19:34

CRM Players' Accolades and Upgrades
TeleTech has been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011, and Yesmail has announced the release of its "Look Book" in celebration of its recent awards for mobile-scalable email design. Meanwhile, West Interactive and VBrick Systems have released major upgrades.
crmbuyer.com | 06-Feb-2012 14:00

Desk.com Makes Help Desks More Mobile, Social
Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO and now vice president and general manager of Desk.com.
crmbuyer.com | 03-Feb-2012 14:00

3 Painfully Common Misuses of CRM
Every tool has a purpose. That's never more clear than when you see a neophyte do-it-yourselfer trying to use a tool for a purpose other than what it was designed for. For instance, anyone wielding a hammer while trying to fix a car's engine is probably not going to succeed.
crmbuyer.com | 02-Feb-2012 14:00

Vendor Videos With a Spark of Personality
I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually reticent to write about most of them simply because it's not my job to provide free advertising.
crmbuyer.com | 01-Feb-2012 14:00

Federal CIO Aims to Goose US Agencies Into Mobile-izing
The sharp growth in the use of smartphones and tablets has spurred the U.S. government to keep pace with the private sector in the use of mobile devices. While federal agencies have been incorporating mobile technology for several years, the rate of adoption could be -- and should be -- far greater, contends Steven VanRoekel, the federal government's chief information officer.
crmbuyer.com | 31-Jan-2012 14:00

Oracle Adds RightNow to Cloud Wars Arsenal
Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.
crmbuyer.com | 30-Jan-2012 14:00

New App Boosts Epicor's Tablet Chops in Retail Setting
At the National Retail Federation's annual convention,Retail's BIG Show 2012, Epicor debuted its latest mobile offering: the Epicor Retail Clienteling application. It is an add-on for Epicor's existing CRM app, said Dave Burton, product director of CRM services -- meaning a retailer has to be an Epicor customer to use it. However, the app comes with a few additional features designed for the tablet form factor.
crmbuyer.com | 27-Jan-2012 14:00

5 Ways to Sell Salespeople on CRM
The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is true. But what's in it for the sales staff?
crmbuyer.com | 26-Jan-2012 14:00

Good on You
My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part compliment and part benediction: "Good on you." They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like "goo-don you." At any rate, good on you.
crmbuyer.com | 25-Jan-2012 14:00

Retail Autopsy: What Killed Borders, Circuit City and Hollywood Video
The Borders near me closed the other month. Wasn't surprising. Ditto for Circuit City. Gone. A few years prior to that it was Hollywood Video that rolled its end credits. The problem is, none of them had to go. They each died of self-inflicted wounds. Sure, a lot of their CEOs came out and blamed Iraq, the economy, e-commerce, etc., for their failures.
crmbuyer.com | 24-Jan-2012 14:00

Guardians of the Grid: Agencies Unite to Bulk Up Utility Cybersecurity
It's one thing to have a computer system at a major bank, retailer or government agency invaded by cybercriminals. At best, such hacking incidents cause minor annoyances, and at worst, they result in high-cost privacy invasions. But what if the hackers get into the power systems that make the entire Internet possible?
crmbuyer.com | 24-Jan-2012 14:00

It's Showtime for CRM
CSC and Infovisionix announced a new agreement at Retail's BIG Show 2012 in New York City. Under the agreement, Infovisionix's suite of retail reporting and analysis tools will be incorporated in CSC's Retail Enterprise Intelligence offering. The new capabilities will help retailers understand and improve key operational and customer performance metrics.
crmbuyer.com | 23-Jan-2012 14:00

When B2C and B2B Worlds Collide
Having spent more than 20 years in the tech industry, I've seen many trends (and related buzzwords) come and go. One trend that I continue to see each year is the "consumerization of IT." While it hasn't always been referred to by that label, consumer demand has manifest itself across a variety of sectors in the industry, from PCs and email to the cloud.
crmbuyer.com | 20-Jan-2012 14:00

Blackbaud Gears Up for Next Enterprise CRM Release
This was a big week for the Nasdaq-listed Blackbaud: The company announced its plans to acquire Convio, which offers a fund-raising application for nonprofits, for $275 million. The feature sets of the Convio application and Blackbaud's CRM software for the nonprofit space are complementary, to a large degree. The newly acquired technology will help Blackbaud further develop its user base.
crmbuyer.com | 20-Jan-2012 14:00

What's Good for Social Business Is Good for Social CRM
I'm ensconced at the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando this week for IBM's concurrent Lotusphere/IBM Connect shows, and all the announcements here paint the picture of a company and a partner ecosystem that is going all-in on collaboration. Big Blue's fuddy-duddy reputation is being completely overhauled, it seems.
crmbuyer.com | 19-Jan-2012 14:00

Customer Experience Problems: More Diagnoses Than Prescriptions
Customer experience is leading off the year as an idea that we need to pay more attention to. In the last week, two important publications have surfaced that highlight this importance. SAP gurus Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer and Volker Hildebrand collaborated on a new book, The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable and Positive Experience to Your Customers .
crmbuyer.com | 18-Jan-2012 14:00

The Shrewd Madness of Crisis Leadership
There is an interesting discussion brewing about the nature of Silicon Valley companies. Are they "tech" companies, as Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo asserts, or are they "... companies in other industries that happen to make heavy use of technology," as CBS Money Watch blogger Erik Sherman says? The gentlemanly disagreement started over the appointment of PayPal President Scott Thompson as the next CEO of Yahoo.
crmbuyer.com | 17-Jan-2012 18:00

Kundra Casts His Lot With Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com has snagged a marquee name for its executive ranks: the former chief information officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra. Kundra, who left his post with the Obama administration last year, is joining Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets.
crmbuyer.com | 17-Jan-2012 14:00

US Cautions on 'Boot Up' Cyberthreat
The routine is almost universal. Every day, millions of workers turn on their computers, take a second or two for a sip of coffee as their desktop or laptop "boots up," and then get to work. In those few seconds, the basic input-output system, or BIOS, of the computer loads the protocols that actually run the PC -- in effect, acting the same as the worker's shot of coffee.
crmbuyer.com | 17-Jan-2012 14:00

Ensuring Software Quality Across a Global Supply Chain
Companies commonly rely on a myriad of software suppliers, from internal teams that share and re-use code to third-party commercial software suppliers and outsourcing development partners. Companies are increasingly being held accountable by their customers for the quality and security of the complete product. Yet third-party code typically isn't tested with the same level of rigor as internally developed code.
crmbuyer.com | 16-Jan-2012 14:00

Avaya Mobilizes Smooth Collaboration in IP Office 8.0
Avaya has released its IP Office 8.0 -- the latest iteration of its trademark unified communications platform for small and mid-sized businesses. The new application comes with a number of new features, some of which focus on the company's core competency of communications, collaboration and presence.
crmbuyer.com | 13-Jan-2012 14:00

If Customers Will Pay, Why Aren't We Selling?
Do customers suffer from a split personality? I say this not because of encounters with clearly rattled fellow shoppers during the holiday season. I say it because of the numbers that consistently come out when customers are surveyed -- and the other numbers that seem to be in the forefront of most buyers' minds.
crmbuyer.com | 12-Jan-2012 14:00

Riding the Tumultuous Retail Waves
The retail space is changing. Twenty years ago we used to shop and buy in person at retail stores. Ten years ago, the Internet started a change Wave. We could buy online but were not ready yet. So we shopped online, but we still bought in person at stores. Now we have reversed this trend completely. Today we shop in retail stores to see and touch, but we buy online because prices are lower.
crmbuyer.com | 12-Jan-2012 14:00

New Challenges in Store for Customer-Facing Gov Websites
Just how much information about the U.S. government is available on the Internet is anybody's guess. But U.S. citizens should be comfortable knowing that if they are persistent enough, they should find much of what they are looking for regarding the federal government online -- whether it's tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, benefits data from the Social Security Administration, or some obscure economic table.
crmbuyer.com | 11-Jan-2012 15:22

Taking the Alternative-Lending Path to Financial Prosperity
It's been difficult in recent years for many people and small businesses to get the loans they need from banks and other traditional lenders, but there are a variety of alternative models. One is person-to-person lending, offered by companies like Prosper, which essentially lets individual people become lenders. "We look at Prosper as a new way of banking," said Chris Larsen, Prosper's CEO and cofounder.
crmbuyer.com | 11-Jan-2012 14:00

Salespeople: Let's Get Reactive
It's the beginning of the year, time for sales kickoff meetings and presidents' clubs at some location within 10 degrees of the equator. These signal events will reward those diligent and fortunate enough to have made or exceeded quota while focusing the attention of everyone on this year's mission.
crmbuyer.com | 11-Jan-2012 14:00

The New Cyber Savannah
Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuorscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, or at least he was when he published American Mania: When More Is Not Enough in 2005. In the book he quotes numerous economic thinkers and writers from the last 300 years, including Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, as he analyzes how we behave in modern business.
crmbuyer.com | 10-Jan-2012 14:00

CRM in 2012: Big Changes in the Wind
The CRM landscape is shifting gears -- and it looks as though 2012 will be the year that will see investments in technologies to cash in on a veritable explosion of social media, mobile and integration opportunities. The winners in 2012 will be those that can figure out new ways to distinguish themselves on the customer service front, said Ajay Kapoor, vice president of customer service for Avaya.
crmbuyer.com | 09-Jan-2012 14:00

Social Media Suicide or who you should not be online
The political ranter/conspiracy theorist, the angry life individual, the used car salesman, or the social media hussy.
crm.ittoolbox.com | 09-Jan-2012 11:00

It's an Intuitive, Integrated, Cloudy, Mobile World
Mobility, intuitive cloud-based tools, iPads, iPhones, and social media have forever transformed the sales ecosystem. Across all industries and sectors, salespeople are no longer chained to a desk or landline, and managers and executives agree that integrated technology makes selling more efficient.
crmbuyer.com | 06-Jan-2012 14:00

Appointment of Consumer Protection Head Ignites Political Furor
President Barack Obama named Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau via a recess appointment on Wednesday. It was a controversial move for the president, prompting Senate Republicans to accuse him of making a power grab and abusing executive authority. Indeed, Republican resistance to confirming the former Ohio attorney general for the post prompted the recess appointment.
crmbuyer.com | 05-Jan-2012 20:39

Oracle's Downward Spiral
Let's be frank: The main reason Oracle's latest quarterly revenues nosedived was backlash from users fed up with two years of price hikes on products, technical support, maintenance and licensing contracts -- and not because of a correction in the overall server hardware market. Yes, it's true that the latest quarterly financials of other high-technology bellwethers also disappointed.
crmbuyer.com | 05-Jan-2012 19:40

Bad Employee Attitude in a Social CRM World: It's Payback Time
In our careers as consumers, we've all encountered employees from time to time who display a shocking lack of manners, aggressive ignorance of what their company sells, or a toxic attitude that suggests we're seen as an enemy rather than a customer. "How in the world did this person get this job?" we might ask as we hang up the phone or flee the store. "And how in the world is this person allowed to keep this job?"
crmbuyer.com | 05-Jan-2012 14:00

The Road to Resilience
Welcome back to the discussion. At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business. We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture. Forty miles per gallon is the new 30, someone said, and I have seen or heard the word "sustainable" used tentatively more than once in advertising.
crmbuyer.com | 04-Jan-2012 14:00

Hey Big Spenders: Federal Infosec Market Poised for a Growth Spurt
Cybersecurity is such a pressing issue that the U.S. government will be dedicating a good chunk of its annual information technology budget to protecting data systems from breaches, hackers and other threats. Tthe number of cybersecurity incidents reported by federal agencies has increased from 5,503 in 2006 to 41,776 incidents in 2010, according to the GAO.
crmbuyer.com | 03-Jan-2012 14:00

Webinars - kick start your consulting business and solution selling plus
starting your consulting business, solution selling, and don't waste time with social media
crm.ittoolbox.com | 02-Jan-2012 17:59

The 5 KPIs of PMO Proof
For many companies, the role of the PMO seems like an enigma. Sure, everyone knows that PMOs exist to streamline project operations so time and money aren't wasted, but what do they actually do? Failure to answer this question has led many companies to question the value of the PMO in the years after its establishment. However, the burden of proof is on the PMO -- not the executives.
crmbuyer.com | 29-Dec-2011 14:00

Amazon Surges, Netflix Paddles Against Customer Satisfaction Current
After seven years of a neck-and-neck race for first place in customer satisfaction, Amazon has pulled decisively ahead of Netflix, according to ForeSee's annual Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index. Amazon moved ahead 2 points to reach the top spot with 88 on the index's 100-point scale. Netflix slid 7 points to 79. Amazon's 88 score is an all-time high for the 14-year-old index.
crmbuyer.com | 28-Dec-2011 21:23

Shall We Dance? A Tale of Executives and PMOs
"It takes two to tango." Ronald Reagan said this of the contentious relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the final stages of the Cold War. Unfortunately, this also applies to executives and project management offices. At times, it seems they are destined to face off against each other, but this should not be the case.
crmbuyer.com | 28-Dec-2011 14:00

My New Year's Poem for 2012
Are you making New Year's resolutions or resolving to be a doer?
crm.ittoolbox.com | 26-Dec-2011 13:10

Recap, technologies, leadership, productivity for Friday December 23
Late in posting but 4 minutes to a smarter you
crm.ittoolbox.com | 26-Dec-2011 09:44

Time Tracking and Invoicing for Consultants
Don't leave money on the table
crm.ittoolbox.com | 22-Dec-2011 09:41

The Beginning of the Bounce
There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair , a magazine I've come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than I would. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics, as well as the glossy pictures and stories of pop-culture icons that seem to be necessary to sell a magazine these days.
crmbuyer.com | 21-Dec-2011 14:00

Feds on Successful IT Procurement: This Is How It's Done
Federal information technology managers -- often cited for poor execution of procurement practices -- now have some project role models to follow for successfully managing IT investments. The federal General Accountability Office has issued a report on seven case studies of successful government IT procurement projects.
crmbuyer.com | 20-Dec-2011 14:00

The Role of CRM in Logistics Companies' IT Strategies, Part 3
The logistics industry is facing challenges in adopting a sustainable and profitable CRM strategy, and there is inertia when it comes to replacing or augmenting disparate CRM solutions adopted by different business units, like retail, as well as various channels, like phone, Web, email, etc.
crmbuyer.com | 19-Dec-2011 14:00