The call center, as an entity, has often been tasked with "making more with less." Customer expectations are rising, labor costs are rising, competition is rising. So what's going down? Budgets, frequently. However, in the past, companies could rely on a high degree of spending from consumers and businesses. The potential sales were there, they merely had to compete for them. Fast-forward to 2008, and it's impossible to pretend that the economy in general, and consumer and B2B pennies in particular, are not being pinched.[More...]
Virtualization is one of the most significant hot-button topics in enterprise today. Linux server virtualization has allowed enterprises to leverage resources more efficiently. It also is giving CIOs and IT managers a tool to address growing corporate concerns over environmental issues and rising energy costs.[More...]
HP's now officially pending EDS buy for just shy of $14 billion positions the combined companies to organize and manage the hosted/on-premises mix to maximum efficiency and lowest total cost of ownership. It's a great goal to shoot for because all they have to do is beat IBM. With this merger, the IT/business transformation second-source in the global market is alive and well.[More...]
Securing Web applications is the No. 1 problem facing security professionals today. With 162 million Web sites in existence and millions more popping up each month, the sheer size of the problem is staggering -- not to mention the fact that nine out of 10 Web sites have serious vulnerabilities that can put critical customer data at risk.[More...]
A British government agency has complained to the European Commission about the lack of interoperability in some of Microsoft's applications, but regulators are reportedly not opening a new formal inquiry on the complaint. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency filed the complaint with the UK's Office of Fair Trading last October, citing two issues.[More...]
SAP held its massive annual conference, Sapphire, last week and made the usual flurry of announcements and presentations to its 15,000-some attendees. Still, as is typical of most conferences, the best information filtered out between the official scheduled events.[More...]
Bronto is no dinosaur. Founded by former Red Hat executives and launched in 2002, the e-mail marketing software provider has certainly seen its industry and marketplace evolve and change dramatically around it. While questions are often raised about whether e-mail can remain an effective marketing channel given the flood of spam invading consumers' in-boxes and, spending on the channel continues to grow.[More...]
Typically, new technologies tend to promise more than they deliver. That has not been the case with Web services, which are being integrated into just about every new e-commerce application. "Support for Web services has come from application vendors, application development tool suppliers and middleware vendors," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner with market research firm ZapThink.[More...]
The software as a service trend is revolutionizing the call center industry, as companies of all sizes are now discovering the advantages of going with hosted versus on-premise solutions. With SaaS for the call center, applications are hosted on a shared platform in a data center and delivered to the agents via the Internet or dedicated network.[More...]
Dell unveiled an array of virtualization solutions Wednesday. The hardware maker's new lineup includes more than a dozen servers, tools and services designed to make the deployment and management of virtual environments as simple as possible for enterprises regardless of size, the company said. Four new virtualization-optimized servers stand at the center of the hardware manufacturer's latest offering.[More...]
SAP and Research In Motion announced last week that they were partnering to develop a native BlackBerry client to link to SAP CRM, and then, eventually, to the firm's other business applications. The move is a no brainer for SAP, writes Vinnie Mirchandani, an ex-Gartner analyst and founder of the advisory firm Deal Architect.[More...]
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