Category: Comments & opinions

Global CRM Market Up 13 Percent In 2012 Gartner, Inc. conducted an extensive survey of chief executive officers, which reported that CEOs rate customer relationship management (CRM) as “…the most important area of investment to improve their business.” That year, revenue from the global CRM market totaled just over $12 billion. The latest report from Gartner now shows the worldwide CRM software market hitting $23.2 billion in 2014. This represents an increase of over thirteen percent from the previous year. Image: The Citrix Blog Salesforce.com, a leading provider of cloud-based…

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When it comes to corporate sales, executives and salespeople can be impatient about technology deployments that could affect the sales cycle. They want technologies that can help them reach more customers and close more deals, but they don’t want technology issues to sit between them and closing their next deal. Here are five ways to speed up customer relationship management (CRM) deployments for your sales department. Go Cloud First with CRM Among the many benefits of going with a cloud-based CRM platform is the low barrier to entry (no hardware…

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Engineer to order (ETO) manufacturing has been around for as long as manufacturing has been around. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has been around in one form or another for almost as long. What’s slightly newer is ERP for ETO manufacturing. In the past, ETO manufacturers either had to code an ERP application to meet their specific needs or, as was more often the case, they did everything manually. Manual processes in today’s manufacturing market are the kiss of death. Any manufacturing business must be agile, responsive, and lean, but for…

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The employees at Microsoft’s research centre in Serbia are celebrating its 10th anniversary but it’s a fair bet that, unless you’re Serbian, you didn’t know that one of the world’s largest software companies has a significant presence there. I spoke by phone to Dragan Tomic, principal group manager of the Microsoft Development Center Serbia, about the work done in this country of seven million people at the nexus of central and south-eastern Europe. First, I ask him, why Serbia? The Serbs gave us the genius of Nikola Tesla (and modern…

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Firm lets users analyse geospatial data, and do it inside Hadoop or NoSQL Oracle is adding new analytics capabilities to Hadoop and NoSQL databases, as it aims to help people struggling to make sense of huge datasets. Its latest set of tools, labelled Oracle Big Data Spatial and Graph, targets a wider variety of datasets than the company’s older solutions in this space, while cutting back on any need to move data around. Instead, users can process data inside Hadoop while running the tool, saving time and money on analytics…

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Sensors embedded in household objects allow you to control lights, locks and surf the web There is no longer an offline world​​ ​For 30 and 40-somethings, going online meant hearing weird sounds from the speakers of a desktop computer. Many spent nights awake, surfing the web on those hours when no one else in the household demanded to talk on the phone. In the “good ol’ days” of 1980s and 1990s, you needed a landline and a computer to access the internet and there was a clear distinction between what…

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More than 15% of European organisations now use more than 1000 cloud apps with Google Drive, Facebook and Twitter the most popular, according to a report from Netskope. (c)iStock.com/shutter_m The findings, which appear in the April 2015 Netskope Cloud Report, saw iCloud and Salesforce make the top five. Five cloud storage apps (Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive for Business, OneDrive and Dropbox) made the top 12, alongside four social apps (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn). Of the organisations analysed in the Netskope Cloud, over a quarter use more than 1000 apps, with…

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EMC chief outlines three key business requirements that must be addressed … Businesses must prepare for a “digital future” where people are always connected and engaged online, according to EMC chief executive and chairman Joe Tucci. Speaking at a keynote at the EMC World conference in Las Vegas, Tucci claimed the transition to an ever more connected world, brought on by the Internet of Things (IoT), was a “huge digital wave crashing down upon business as usual”. He added: “We’re living in interesting times, from an IT perspective we live in unprecedented times. “We…

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Research from Onapsis shows that more than 95 percent of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were exposed to vulnerabilities that could let cyberattackers take full control of a business. The fact that ERP systems are low-hanging fruit isn’t what makes them such an attractive target for attackers, however: it’s what the ERP is used for that makes breaching such a system so lucrative. Consider the fact that these applications are at the heart of any business. They store information critical to a business, and they run critical processes. As such, they open…

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An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provides a great record of what customers have purchased and when they paid for it. It does less well when asked to describe customers—what type of customer are they, how big are they, how much effort the company spends retaining the customer, and so on. These data are stored in the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Traditionally, ERP systems have offered a lot of built-in reporting. Some systems calculate the usage rate of items by customer—a quick and easy way to predict when the…

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