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The CRM Week In Review
Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions
What's new in CRM?
We saw two new (or revised-new) solutions this week. First, Salesboom.com has announced the release of its next-generation hosted CRM and CLM (customer lifecycle management, in case you were breathlessly awaiting yet another acronym to add to the growing list). The latest release is Salesboom.com v6.0, and Customer Interaction Solutions assistant editor David Butcher tells you all about it here.
Second, making an entrance into the on-demand CRM party this week is Aastra Intecom (formerly EADS Telecom North America), which launched a new hosted CRM solution called Centegy Virtual Contact Center solution. News and analysis on this release is here.
Sighs of relief could be heard in the boardroom of Siebel this week, as it was announced that SEC charges against the company were thrown out by a judge, nullifying an SEC lawsuit accusing Siebel of "breaking an SEC rule on how corporations disclose market-moving information." (Essentially, Siebel was accused of what would be known as a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" manoeuver to Monty Python fans.) Siebel's CFO Kenneth Goldman was accused of attending private events in 2003 and "tipping off institutional investors present at these events by characterizing the company's performance as 'good' or 'better' and noting that there were $5 million deals in the software company's pipeline." Read the full story, written by TMCnet CRM Alert columnist David Sims.
Returning to the old IT adage of "Garbage In, Garbage Out" goes a long way to explaining why so many CRM implementations have not lived up to their expectations. Customer Interaction Solutions conventional wisdom says, "It's hard for a solution to live up to its expectations when no one knows what the expectations were in the first place." The article is here.
In the telecom sector, Customer Interaction Solutions' executive editor Glenn Kalinoski identified three corporate heroes-of-the-week for their generous donations to aid agencies working in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the companies include Cisco, with an expected donation of $3 million; AT&T, with an outright $500,000 and pledges to match employee donations; and Intel, which will donate $1 million to the Red Cross and match employee contributions. Here's the full article.
Other Good Samaritans in the telecom sector, according to David Sims, include: Nova Engineering; VeriFone, Inc.; Avatel Technologies, Inc. (an Avaya Business Partner); Compact Power Systems, LLC; 3Com Corp., Cox Communications; Western Union; and SBC Communications. These companies are helping by providing much needed telecom hardware and services at no cost or reduced cost to improve communications in the area. Read the full story.
In the realm of "nyah, nyah" marketing, two companies, Entellium CRM and NetSuite, announced this week that they are taking customers from the big boys: Salesforce.com and Siebel. Read Customer Interaction Solutions' editorial director Tracey Schelmetic's article here.
Not to be outdone, Salesforce.com had a "nyah nyah" moment of its own, when it was able to announce its 300,000th user. Read TMCnet executive editor Bob Liu's summation here. All we can say is, Salesforce.com's network operations centers must make the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise look shabby.
On the mergers and acquisitions front, there was news of two happenings. First, ScanSoft and Nuance shareholders approved the merger of those two companies, which will create one of the largest speech technology companies in the world. Details may be found here. We wish the merged company a happy honeymoon and a strong marriage.
Customer Interaction Solutions assistant editor David Butcher examines the other merger, which was announced just today: the acquisition of analytics company the Opus Group by New York-based Verint Systems Inc., a company known for call recording and quality monitoring. Though Verint already offers analytics, we think the acquisition of Opus Group will make it the company to beat when it comes to real-time analytics and performance monitoring. Read the full article.
See? We promised this week's CRM news would be just as exciting as last week's!
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles by Tracey Schelmetic, please visit:
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