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The article highlights CRM 2.0 capabilities that can aid companies in achieving a more effective relationships with customers and better leverage stakeholder brainshare. It notes that Salesforce.com and Oracle have carried out new features and products that permit organizations in keying out the hottest ideas faster, enhance team productivity, and improving the capacity of large organizations to deliver more personal customer service. It also adds that the Internet and Web 2.0 phenomenon has provided superfluity of information sources that have altered the vendor-customer relationship from highly vendor-centric to one wherein vendors and customers may have relationships with one another with partners and distributors and other customers as well. INSET: Looking for answers.

This article focuses on the problems faced by the company Salesforce.com Inc. in managing its rapidly growing customer base. The company provides customer relationship management software. On December 20, 2005, the service provided by the company suffered an outage for nearly 5 hours. However, according to the company officials, it was only a minor interruption in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. Interviews with several Salesforce.com customers and partners revealed that it happened regularly in the last year. Bruce Francis, the company's vice president of corporate strategy, said that an extremely rare and undocumented bug in its database was responsible for the December 20 outage. He also added that it was resolved quickly. Some customers are also complaining about the performance degradation from last few months. CEO Marc Benioff said that the reason was the implementation of a new data center. Customers believe that the problems at Salesforce.com may be a product of its own success. The number of Salesforce.com customers has increased by 115 % during January 2005 to October 2005.

Squelch is a new-gen customer experience bot developer for online businesses that servse customers after the sale — from handling onboarding on day one through trouble tickets on day 1,001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports the ongoing price war between the U.S.-based cloud data storage companies, Snowflake and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Topics discussed include 80 percent price cut by Snowflake in a short period of time, importance of pricing factors in helping clients make storage-buying decisions, and Snowflake's views on its customer-centric approach of providing a budgeted data storage cost.

The article reports that 11 million U.S. dollars has been raised by the business analytics software firm AtScale in a Series B round of financing led by the venture capital firm Comcast Ventures. It presents views of AtScale chief executive officer (CEO) Dave Mariani on using the funding to grow its customer support and sales operations to meet demand of its software.

The article offers information on a report by consultancy firm Accenture which reveals that U.S. hospital-provided mobile health apps are used by few patients. Topics discussed include views of Brian Kalis, managing director of health practice at Accenture, on suggestions for health care providers to need consumers' need, switching of health providers by patients because of improper online customer service by the providers, and mentions the significance of digital patient engagement.

The author reflects on the issues concerning Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) from Google Inc. He claims that Google has frustrated journalists and analysts by laying claim to 3000 new businesses customers per day ranging from one-man to large enterprises. He asserts that Google has hundreds of paying customers for its GAPE suite. He also believes that there is still work to be done to make Google's GAPE more reliable.

The article reports on the warning released by VMware Corp. concerning its ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 on August 12, 2008. The company has warned its customers and partners of problems on a licensing snafu of VMware ESX and ESX virtualization products. According to the company, the update has caused disruptions on virtual machines where its powering on did not function well. In relevance, the firm has posted a temporary fix and is settling the problem over the updated version of the computer software.

The article discusses the rebranding of Compuware to its Compuware 2.0, in putting again the good services to its enterprise customers and realigns its products and services towards a common set of objectives in Detroit, Michigan. It says that the Compuware 2.0 brings viable old-school Information Technology (IT) company into the new world while holding onto its core values of customer service. According to the article, the company officially selected its new company logo, a three-dimensional guitar that signifies the role Compuware that intends to play in rocking IT world. Moreover, the chief executive officer of Compuware Peter Karmanos is looking to make the company more responsive to market change.

The article outlines developments that take place at SAP, a company that holds patents on scope creep and late deliveries in the U.S. Year 2007 has been a tough year for the company wherein it turned to Business By Design (BBD) software to address its troubles. Its code is not written for the Web, meaning the on-demand versions of its core enterprise software would never match Web-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) products, such as NetSuite and Salesforce.com. To address the situation and to find new growth opportunities, it promised to deliver a new product based on a reinvented code base, on-demand offerings, and focus on midmarket issues.

The article focuses on the plan by Microsoft Corp. called Oslo which is to develop the features and improve the accessibility of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a standardized architecture that supports the integration of various applications, during the SOA & Business Process Conference in October 2007 in Redmond, Washington. It was stated that the company officials intend to enhance SOA's capabilities and usefulness to customers by stretching its products in major areas including server, services, framework, tools and repository. In addition, Microsoft wants to help software developers to save time and money by allowing them to reuse existing codes to create new applications.

The article reports that Radio Systems, selling as PetSafe, opted for an integrated customer relationship management, accounting, and telephony system from Extremely Productive to integrate its existing order management software with a customer relationship management solution. Before the integration, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based manufacturer of pet containment systems, electronic pet doors, indoor fences, and electronic feeders had to input the customer's data twice making it difficult to track warranty service, product exchanges, and shipment of replacement parts. With the integrated system, the company's research and development group and marketing group are also benefiting from the data that the call center employees are collecting and maintaining.

This article reports that Microsoft Corp. is putting great effort to provide best services to its customers by making its people to do overtime. At its Lab in Redmond, Washington Microsoft has a three-pronged attack to give customers and potential customers more information by testing and comparing Windows and Linux in legacy environments. At this lab the company is assessing the effectiveness of each platform's security patching process and also working out on how well Microsoft is working to integrate or support open-source code in its products. In order to upgrade every possible customer to the latest version of Windows, it is testing Windows on old hardware. It was found by Microsoft in these tests that most modern commercial Linux distributions could be installed successfully on systems that have an Intel Corp. In the continuation of this process Microsoft is also testing a wide variety of Unix systems and Berkeley Software Distributions. The company has developed tests and analysis tools to look at how frequently systems need to be patched and what the impact of that is.

The article reports on the use of agile development methodologies such as Extreme Programming and Scrum by Microsoft as a way of revising its wares more frequently to respond to customer needs. Scrum is an agile method for management of software development projects. The other is Extreme Programming, the concept where one might have two people working on a given piece of code, and the idea is that two minds are better than one because one can find problems faster.

The article informs that although adoption rates of customer relationship management (CRM) Software are still lagging, new products released this week point to maturing enterprise-level customer relationship management capabilities for on-demand software. SugarCRM Inc. is announcing the first enterprise edition of its open-source suite, which builds on its Sugar Professional suite. The Sugar Enterprise Edition includes support for Oracle Corp.'s 9i database, as well as mobile work support, which enables workers to automatically synchronize offline changes made to the application. Bob Gatewood, chief technology officer of AthenaHealth Inc., is in the midst of migrating 200 Salesforce.com customer support users to Sugar-CRM's Sugar Professional platform. Gatewood said that SugarCRM's Sugar Professional version is doing the job, but he is interested in the Oracle support of the Enterprise version. Salesnet is announcing what amounts to the second iteration of its Enterprise On-Demand CRM software, which focuses on two main points of functionality streamlining the user experience and enabling a more flexible application so that users can easily refine activity tracking and reporting.

Microsoft Corp. is hard at work to make "Longhorn," the next iteration of its Windows Server product, do more for less by integrating various server software systems. To do it, the company plans to extend. Microsoft is looking to help customers manage costs by enabling and precon-figuring all its server products for Microsoft Operations Manager support. But the moves are not necessarily winning new converts to Microsoft. Microsoft needs to worry less about how it could knit pure-Windows shops more tightly together and worry more about how to work with common standards.

The article focuses on the computer software and operating systems that cater the needs of small and mid-sized business enterprises (SMBs). It states that value added reseller (VAR) sectors aims to adapt a business technology that improves customer service, sales management, and inventory. Also mentioned are the products used in business management including the Cymphonix for bandwidth management, Cisco for virtual private network (VPN), and Symantec for anti-virus.

The article focuses on the acquisition of cloud clinical trial software provider ClearTrial by Oracle. It says that the acquisition aims to design a single-software suite that will help pharmaceutical companies in terms of planning and payment in clinical trials. According to chief executive officer (CEO) Mike Soenen of ClearTrial, the Oracle will be the one provide the right solutions for the pharmaceutical companies to have a better service for its customers.

The article reports on the move of International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to take step on Information On Demand (IOD) initiative. IOD is designed to help businesses better manage and gain deeper insight into data. As part of the initiative, company officials have introduced computer software tools and industry-specific information models, blueprints and consulting services for enterprises to value more its business data. It states that IBM's move is a way to demonstrate better business value and communication to staff and customers.

The author reflects on the reversal plans of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and its officials to support Unified Modelling Language (UML) which is the most-used specification, the way the world models not only applications of the structure, behavior, and architecture but also on business processes and data structure. Microsoft has the modeling technology based on UML and has announced support for UML and such integration of UML into Microsoft tools will be a win-win for customers.

The article focuses on the marketing strategy called "software plus services" employed by computer technology company Microsoft Corp. in the U.S. According to Microsoft chief executive officer (CEO) Steven Anthony Ballmer and other company executives, Microsoft's strategy involves providing on-site offerings hosted by the company itself and other partners. Ballmer claimed that this strategy will offer customers the power of choice and expand the opportunities for partners. Former Exchange Server executive Keith McCall said that Microsoft and its partners have a lot of chances to address the criticality of Microsoft Exchange by delivering managed on-premises and hosted off-premises offerings.

The article reports on the comments of the information technology (IT) users concerning the enterprise open-source software offerings of Linux in the U.S. Open-source technologies is stated to allow customers to get into the product life-cycle process and communicate with the software vendors before it starts designing their product. During the Open Source Business Conference on May 22, 2007, the users explained the benefits and shortcomings of the open-source technologies. The users indicated that the Linux vendors should update their enterprise products and give their consumers more guidance about the content of their services.

The author reports on the utilization of Web-based remote control software for value added reseller (VAR) companies in the U.S. The remote control software includes Reach from LogMein company and GoToAssist from Citrix Systems Inc. It was found that the use of the two software enhance the technical support of organizations provided to end-users and increase customer loyalty. In addition, it states that the software can also be used by information technology companies for training purposes, monitoring risks, and offers connection between computer servers.

The article reports that some customers are still reporting problems with Microsoft Outlook and their calendars despite Microsoft officials declaring that the worst of the problems relating to the daylight-saving time (DST) change is over. IT administrators running Microsoft software have had problems because their users' systems had to be individually patched. Rich Kaplan, vice president for customer service, partners and automation, pointed out that the call volumes and problems have subsided to a moderate and manageable level. However, he admitted that some customers could run into issues, such as Microsoft Outlook Web access and recurring appointments and meetings.

The article presents two blog messages, which presents the views and insights of the people on some issues pertinent to the computer industry. The two blogs discuss two different topic. The first topic focuses on web business, specifically one which deals on customer service. The sender suggests that anyone who has spent time speaking to a customer service in India knows that cutting costs means worse service. The second matter raised pertains to the release of Web 2.0 computer software to the market and the response of Microsoft Corp. on the wide acceptance of the software by the people.

The article reports on the introduction of a new end-to-end transaction management initiative from BMC Software Inc. This is intended to facilitate managing transactions across a company, which will combine transaction data, user experience, and infrastructure monitoring. According to sources, this would improve business service delivery through the reduction of time to resolve transaction problems. Mainview Transaction Analyzer, one of the new products, is able to trace the path that each work unit takes in the appropriate order. The correlate transaction data across different subsystems will then replace a manual, error-prone process.

The article reports on the announcement of the first SAP customer relationship management (CRM) on-demand solution. This online CRM service is a hybrid system which provides an isolated tenancy model combined with high availability and lower security risks. Current and new customers will be able to set up a combination of on-premise and on-demand CRM application services which would depend on their needs, according to SAP officials. The company will also work with Applications On-Demand Platform from IBM Corp. that will provide hosting services based on DB2 database and eServer hardware. Marketing and customer service modules will also be introduced in addition to its CRM applications.

The article presents Saleforce.com Inc.'s chief executive officer Marc Benioff's views on company's on-demand customer relationship management software. He discusses about the company's two confirmed outages, one on December 20 that lasted nearly 6 hours and one minor overnight outage on January 6, that affected its Europe, Middle East and African markets. Some customers have chalked up the issues to growing pains for the exponentially expanding company. But Benioff said their job is to mitigate the risk on the data centers. He admitted that everything is redundant in the new data centers of salesforce.com. And, the level of redundancy is very, very strong. Benioff said the company does everything it can not to get to a condition where it experiences hours-long outages. Benioff said that the December 20 outage was an anomaly and the company doesn't hope to see again.

This article presents the author's views on the problems of the vendors who promise to deliver the software as a service in the enterprise environment. On December 20, 2005, Salesforce.com Inc. suffered an outage and several of its users experienced considerable inconvenience that day. The system that Salesforce.com wants to build around its software-as-a-service platform also took a hit. Salesforce.com promises to provide a platform for hosting other applications. And as its customer base increases, the risk of an outage affecting a broader audience also grows. Unless service providers such as Salesforce.com find a way to improve their performance, enterprise administrators will not be able to guarantee greater than 97 percent uptime for applications that touch the service.

The article presents information on Verticalnet Inc. The company will announce its Impact Sourcing offering that provides users with access to its entire XE Suite of supply management software as an on-demand service coupled with bundled support and pay-as-you-go pricing. Impact Sourcing is designed to let users focus on a specific category segment, when needed, rather than implement an entire suite of software for specific functionality. Users can get access to negotiation management and auctions just for that slice of category. The XE Suite's supply management modules consist of Program Manager, Spend Manager, Negotiation Manager, Procurement Manager, Contract Manager and Performance Manager.

The article reports on Microsoft Corp.'s plan to enhance its operating systems. The company will bundle the core of the Windows AntiSpyware product into Windows Vista, the version of Windows due in 2006. Competitors, such as RealNetworks, Sun and IBM, argue that bundling reduces customer choice and hurts users in the long run. Microsoft's competitors say if users had a chance to dabble with third-party products which always outshine Microsoft's offerings, they would be willing to shell out for them in a heartbeat. It is expected Microsoft to dump Windows Messenger and replace it with MSN Messenger by the time Vista ships. Microsoft has merged the MSN and Windows platform divisions into one of its three newly reorganized business units.

Presents the author's experience regarding the use of computer software Service Manager 3.0, developed by the company SOA Software. Creation of templates to speed service deployment that can set up policies for discovery and availability of new services as they become available; Need to document what happened, how and why in a utility computing selling where service-level agreements must be satisfied.

This article reports that speech software rivals Scansoft Inc., and Nuance Communications Inc., are teaming up to fight off challenges from enterprise IT heavyweights Microsoft Corp., and International Business Machine Corp. ScanSoft, Massachusetts, officials said last week it will pay $221 million to acquire its Menlo Park, California rival, Nuance. As the speech business has grown, it has attracted a lot of people, like IBM and Microsoft, who are investing heavily and making a lot more noise. The combined company's resources will bring enterprises more innovative products in such areas as call centers, directory assistance, dictation and mobile phones, as well as better services to support those products. Industry insiders agreed that the merger would help enterprises ease the pain of evaluating speech deployments. The merger will also bring the combined company a savings of $20 million to $25 million, through cutting some of the companies roughly 1,100 employees, consolidating office sites and eliminating duplicate operating expenses according to Paul Ricci, ScanSoft's chairman and CEO. INSET: Top speech players.

This article reports that new offerings from Kana Inc. and FrontRange Solutions Inc. will give enterprises more options for enhancing and expanding customer service and support operations. Kana plans to announce this week a new application called Resolution that combines business process management (BPM) with knowledge management to automate customer service and support. Meanwhile, FrontRange, of Pleasanton, California, announced last week that it is expanding its Heat customer service and support product line into IT service management, giving customers an all-in-one solution. Application consolidation and process automation will be a benefit of both products. Kana's Resolution expands on the knowledge management capabilities of the Redwood City, California, company's IQ product line, adding integrated BPM to provide a transactional offering in combination with a knowledge base. The software can also be used as a front end to existing call center applications, said Kana officials, giving customer service representatives a unified interface rather than requiring them to toggle between applications.

This article focuses on the implementation of LiveTime Support Desk in Prescott, Arizona. Prescott with population 38,000 is in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country, and the city government's IT needs have increased with its size. The IT department has grown in just a few years from two employees and 100 computers to 10 employees and more than 300 computers. Even with greater staffing, the demands on the department have increased, and its help desk software has failed to keep up. By the end of last year, the Prescott IT department had new requirements. It wanted to reduce the number of people walking in and calling with problems. It wanted to be able not only to track cases but also to track the assets behind those cases, that is, phones, computers and so forth. What's more, members of the IT department needed to travel to more than 20 sites in the city to do their work, and they wanted to be able to access the help desk system wherever they were. LiveTime Support Desk is Unix-based and runs on the Web using Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition.

The article presents an interview with Anne Mulcahy, chairman and CEO of Xerox Corp. The company is launching new hardware and software and tweaking its brand strategy. According to Mulcahy, the customers want them to come to them with an integrated offering and solve business problems that need to be services-led instead of technology-led. The annuity kind of business model is certainly a powerful one for the business. And yeah, it's not as asset-intensive, certainly, as the hardware side of the business. According to her, they have a respect for building on the competencies of the company. So they'll stay within the perimeters of the document management space. They're licensing consumer products like the 17-inch flat screen or the projectors. The company has pointed toward digitizing and colorizing the office. The new business of printing, which is really the whole offset transfer opportunity and the innovation services, which are really the document-intensive business process deals are the new growth opportunities for the company.

The article presents information about the new product SalesLogix from Best Software Inc. SalesLogix has improved the product beyond what a .2 release would imply. SalesLogix 6.2 includes several enhancements to customer service and sales processes while improving administration, which should boost efficiency for most users. The cost of SalesLogix, which shipped last month, varies widely depending on the modules purchased. Although many of SalesLogix's administrative elements were improved, companies will need to invest in administrative and development expertise to set up and tune the software for changes in sales and support processes. In tests, it was found that the improvements to the customer service portion will make it easier for companies to provide broader customer service options. The customer service component now can tap into SalesLogix's SpeedSearch feature while gaining ticket and contract management tools. SpeedSearch, which is an internal search application is quite useful because it includes good filtering capabilities and can search a wide range of documents, such as support documents, in addition to SalesLogix data.

Siebel Systems Inc. and Electronic Data Systems Corp. are supposed to announce a partnership between them that could help companies avoid many of the costs and complexities of managing customer relationship management systems in enterprises. The companies will announce Electronic Data Systems' (EDS) plans to add Siebel's software to its business process outsourcing (BPO) services. The pact calls for EDS employees who run customer-facing business operations for other companies, most typically contact centers, to use Siebel's applications. Those Siebel applications will be integrated with other business processes managed by EDS. The move lets EDS extend its BPO offerings into the front office as it adds Siebel's software--still the most widely used software despite three straight years of falling license revenues--to the mix of applications it supports. The partnership is the first of many Siebel plans to ink in the BPO arena, as the company shifts its focus from license revenue to service revenue.

New Offerings in hosted contact center services are aimed at meeting enterprises' growing demands for faster time to benefit with a lower cost of ownership by outsourcing more of their customer relationship management operations. UniPress Software Inc. provides a prime example of the kinds of new offerings popping up. The Edison, New Jersey, company, in tandem with the rollout this week of Version 6.5 of its flagship FootPrints customer service and support application, will announce it is selling the software in a hosted environment. The FootPrints Hosting Service will be sold like licensed software but with an 18 percent fee added for the hosting. Each customer gets an instance of FootPrints with full system administration privileges, according to UniPress officials. In a similar vein, hosted business application service provider NetSuite Inc. will announce the integrated hosted call center services through a partnership with White Pajama Inc., which announced a similar deal with Salesforce.com Inc. last month.

Siebel Systems Inc. is adding customer service capabilities to its UpShot Edition hosted CRM service, giving enterprises the opportunity to extend the technology to more users in an organisation. Last week Siebel pumped up its hosted customer relationship management's sales and marketing services with added customer service and support capabilities. Siebel, of San Mateo, California, completed the acquisition of UpShot Corp., of Mountain View, California, last month. The new services could allow current UpShot Edition customer AccuWeather Inc. to add 25 more users to its UpShot deployment, said Kathy Fiore, CIO at AccuWeather, which has more than 40 UpShot users, mostly in sales.

Siebel Systems Inc. is providing solutions designed to help call center operations that will soon be hamstrung by National Do Not Call Registry regulations and that are often troubled by high employee turnover rates. The San Mateo, California, developer last week introduced two packaged software offerings designed to improve the performance and effectiveness of call center and sales personnel. Offerings, Siebel Contact Center Performance Solutions and Sales Performance Solutions, are focused on increasing the skill levels and capabilities of customer service and telesales employees.

Highlights the integration of the customer service software by E.piphany Inc. in California. Aim of the firm to make the application easy to integrate with other applications; Improvement in the ease of use and integration of the application; Launch of the E.piphany Service 6.0.

Reports the introduction of the computer Advanced Services program provided by Cisco Systems Inc. Improvement of network operations; Provision of customers satisfaction; Development of customer services.

Reports the upgrading of electronicService Center online customer service software from Technologies Inc. in the United States. Enhancement of Web site self-service offering; Option of grouping data; Development of clients relationship management applications.

Reports that Sybase Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. have rolled out software that provides platforms for integrating network service providers' broad array of operational support systems. Difficulty that telecommunications firms have in supplying customer care services that go with advanced voice, data and Internet services; Features of Sybase's Telecommunications e-Business Support Systems Portal Plus Intelligence.

Reports on Primus Knowledge Solutions Inc.'s release of an enhanced version of its assisted service and electronic mail management software, Primus Interchange 1.1 and an add-on product, Primus Interchange Chat. Features; Capabilities; System requirements.