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The Basic, No-Nonsense, Undisputed Truth About the Customer June 23, 2011 Whether driven by lack of product differentiation, insufficient revenue growth, competitive pressures, or simply the need to improve the prospect/customer experience, companies are seeking to better understand their customers in order to more effectively acquire, retain and profitably monetize their business.

The 3 Pillars of Revenue Performance Management June 08, 2011 A couple of weeks ago, Marketo announced its research-based belief that its form of revenue performance management could help grow global GDP by $2.5 trillion by 2015. I love it when emerging companies talk about big plans this way. It reminds me of the young plumber who upon seeing Niagara Falls for the first time says, "I think I can fix it!"

Modeling in 4 Dimensions June 01, 2011 Modeling is a big idea and one that I started noodling on many years ago. In the last couple of weeks, I've looked at the cloud computing model, or what it ought to be. Today I am looking at a broader paradigm. One of the great things about new paradigms is that there is no model per se. In a way, a new paradigm is an opportunity to create the model; it's an incipient model, perhaps.

The Data Experience Transformation May 04, 2011 Admit it: You never think about data storage any more. We used to, quite a bit. Long before the storage glut that exists today, there was already too much of it, and it was hard to find places to store it. When we built software, it was with an eye toward maximizing our limited storage capacities, we looked after computer memory the way thirsty people in a desert manage their canteens.

BI Applications Trending Toward Ease of Use and Mobility May 03, 2011 Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit 2011 kicked off on Monday in Los Angeles. It is the sister conference to one held in the beginning of the year in London. While the keynote speakers and participating companies vary, the general themes running through both conferences are the same. One is that with every passing year, business intelligence technology and applications get ever more consumerized for the business-end user.

Salesforce.com's Best Shopping Bets April 08, 2011 Salesforce.com is on a buying binge as it attempts to build on its extraordinary sales momentum and broaden its market penetration within existing customer organizations and among new organizations. Since the end of last year, Salesforce.com has acquired five companies starting with Heroku and Etacts in December, Dimdim in January, Manymoon in February, and Radian6 at the end of March.

Chasing Customers Into the Virtual Parking Lot March 31, 2011 The online shopping cart has become as much of a wish list as anything, giving consumers a place to store, compare, consider and dream about potential purchases. E-tailers, however, would like to see those potential purchases become actual ones, and they're coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of doing just that.

Salesforce.com Snags Radian6 in Social Media Shopping Spree March 30, 2011 Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other online communities, analyze them, and get real-time results.

9 Ways to Sharpen Your Business Intelligence March 17, 2011 In a time of economic turmoil, business intelligence (BI) initiatives stand out for their potential to improve corporate performance through better use of data gathering by disparate systems. Compared with many enterprise IT projects, BI requires relatively modest investments. One of the most important trends in information technology has been the emergence of a market for general-purpose business intelligence tools.

IBM Aims to Help Enterprises Smarten Up About Social Commerce March 14, 2011 IBM unveiled a new service on Monday that will help companies market and sell their products online. The new division, called "Smarter Commerce," offers IBM customers real-time marketing analytics and brand assessment tools for Facebook and Twitter. Smarter Commerce also offers consumer-behavior analytics capabilities for other online vehicles, including advertising, marketing campaigns and catalogs.

Retail Be Nimble, Retail Be Quick March 05, 2011 Retailers are quickly realizing the value of adopting technologies that provide insight and analysis of their customers' behavior and experience. There's no ignoring the value of a technology that provides a new generation of intelligence and agility, but the hundreds or even thousands of transactions taking place as a system monitors a customer's every move can strain a retailer's IT infrastructure.

IBM's Watson Finds 'Jeopardy' Elementary February 22, 2011 The finals of its highly publicized "Jeopardy" tournament found IBM's "Watson" computer system handily winning with a total of $77,147 -- upwards of $50,000 more than the sums amassed by Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, its grand champion adversaries. Watson's $1 million grand prize will be split equally between two charities designated by IBM.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Lets Sales Pros Work in Familiar Territory February 21, 2011 Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides customers with rich sales force automation capabilities in addition to marketing automation, customer data management, customer service and analytics, Bill Patterson, director of product management for Microsoft Dynamics, told CRM Buyer. It offers customers the choice of an on-premises deployment, partner-hosted option or cloud-based option.

Watson Graduates From Game Contestant to Physician Assistant February 18, 2011 Fresh from a super-sized "Jeopardy" victory where it looked suspiciously like President Obama's ubiquitous teleprompter, IBM supercomputer Watson is about to become Dr. Watson, M.D. assistant. A joint venture will combine IBM's question-answering, language-processing, and machine-learning capabilities with Nuance Healthcare's speech-recognition and clinical-language understanding solutions to assist physicians in patient diagnosis and treatment.

IBM's Watson Takes One Small Step for a Computer February 15, 2011 Instantly sorting 15 trillion memory bytes to find the right answer to a "Jeopardy" question: Elementary, my dear Watson. Or so an IBM supercomputer named "Watson" set out to prove Monday, tackling trivia with the popular television game show's all-time human champs, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.

Data-Driven Decisions - Not Hunches February 01, 2011 Consumers are spending more time and money online today than ever before. They start and end their day checking email and popping onto social gaming and shopping sites. This often comes at the expense of other entertainment options like traditional television, film or even spending an evening out. What is it that's so appealing about sitting at home in front of a computer monitor?

The New Wrinkles January 12, 2011 We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so even better. Most importantly, this was not a one-time event.

Oracle Woos SAP User Base With Financial Analytics App January 11, 2011 Oracle is debuting a business intelligence module -- for SAP users. Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP is designed to help SAP users wring more value out of their financial systems. While they are at it, Oracle no doubt hopes, these users may opt to migrate more of their operations to the Oracle platform.

In Sales Forecasting, Speed Saves, Slowness Kills January 10, 2011 In April and May 2010, Aberdeen surveyed 422 executives from a variety of different industries, and the results were clear: Rapid forecasters -- companies that collect and prepare reliable sales forecasts in less than half an hour -- significantly outperform slow forecasters in terms of their current and year-over-year performance in sales effectiveness.

This Year, Getting There Is the Challenge January 05, 2011 The cost of business travel is going up and up and up and, oh yeah, Happy New Year. Forget all the CRM prognostications you've been reading over the holidays, the only one of significance to your business and to CRM is what you'll be paying to get in front of customers. Last week a former Shell Oil president, John Hofmeister, gave an interview on CNN Money in which he forecast US$5 per gallon gasoline by 2012.