Customer Relationship Management - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Oracle buys Art Technology Group for $1 billion

  Oracle announced Tuesday that it plans to buy e-commerce vendor Art Technology Group for about $US1 billion. The deal is expected to be completed early next year.

• Informatica teams with Cloudera to ease Hadoop use

  Informatica has modified its business intelligence software so that it can work with Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, the two companies announced Monday.

• 27 things you need to know about Oracle, SAP and HP

  The last month has seen a blur of activity in Oracle's corporate theft lawsuit against SAP, which goes to trial in a California district court on Monday morning. SAP has conceded some misdeeds, Oracle has made a meal of it in the press, and HP has somehow been dragged into the kerfuffle. Here's what you need to know to understand what's going on with Oracle, SAP, HP and that now defunct company called TomorrowNow.

• Red Hat CEO: Software vendor model is broken

  The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.

• SugarCRM offers CRM to OEMs, and readies native iPhone app

  SugarCRM has repackaged its open-source, browser-based customer relationship management platform to make it easier for other vendors to put their own brand on products and services built with SugarCRM, the company announced Thursday. But it is also working on a native iPhone app that will put the brand under the noses of many more users.

• Oracle plans Q1 2011 release for Fusion Apps

  The first release of Oracle's long-awaited, next-generation Fusion Applications will be generally available in the first quarter of 2011, CEO Larry Ellison said during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday.

• Mobile CRM app helps construction firm diversify its business

  VCC, a nationwide retail construction company, was forced to diversify when the recession struck. The company found that giving project managers smartphone access to customer data was a big boost in attracting new business.

• Salesforce.com rolls out contact-data service

  Salesforce.com rolled out a new service on Wednesday that integrates business-contact information with its own CRM (customer relationship management) application and Chatter collaboration software.

• The Two Most Meaningful CRM Reports

  CRM systems are where the richest data about customer relationships is supposed to live, and most CRM systems provide a report-writing system as well as dozens of canned reports.

• Speech recognition systems must get smarter, professor says

  Those who loathe talking on the phone to automated speech recognition systems may take solace in the fact that scientists are working to make such systems more lifelike and less annoying to use.

• SAP warms to open source

  Although not traditionally known for its contributions to the open-source community, the German-based SAP is adopting more open-source software, as well as contributing more of its own code back into the community, company officials said in an interview.

• CRM prominent on Google Apps marketplace

  CRM (customer relationship management) software has established a significant foothold on Google's Apps Marketplace since its launch in March, according to an official blog post this week.

• Zendesk integrates Twitter into customer service app

  Zendesk has upgraded its Web-based help desk software to simplify and automate how its users capture, analyze and respond to public Twitter messages that merit a customer-service response.

• Microsoft opening CRM app store

  Microsoft plans to take a cue from rival CRM (customer relationship management) vendor Salesforce.com with the upcoming release of CRM 2011, by adding a marketplace site where partners can sell complementary applications.

• CRM Systems: Unite or Die?

  When it comes to CRM systems, large companies are anything but centralized.