Articles by Erika Morphy

Avaya is reportedly negotiating with private equity companies and at least two competitors about selling portions or all of its multifaceted telecom portfolio Private equity firms are dazzled by Avaya's US$6 billion cash flow and low debt levels, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Silver Lake, a private equity firm that specializes i...

What should companies do -- and what should they refrain from doing -- when reacting to blog postings about their products or services? Robert Cox, president of the New York-based Media BloggersAssociation and a consultant to consumer packaged goods companies, has veryspecific ideas on the subject What they shouldn't do: Ignore the situation, or wo...

A lawsuit that began as a quest to reimburse customers for alleged collusion among telecom providers to lock upstart companies out of the market and keep prices high has ended with new restrictions on how such class action suits can be brought into court Attorneys Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman brought the class action, Twombly v. Bell Atlantic C...

Oracle has taken what it deemed to be the best CRM features from Siebel 8 and PeopleSoft 9, as well as some of its own native functionality, and incorporated them into its latest E-Business Suite release, version 12 "There have been improvements made across all three applications," Mike Betzer, vice president of Oracle's CRM Strategy, told CRM Buye...

Through both words and actions, executives from Salesforce.com and Google have made clear they hold each other in high esteem. Just how deep that mutual admiration runs is suggested by a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal that the two companies are working through details of a potential partnership Possible developments from the reported tie-up...

Interactive Intelligence has introduced a mobile offering that duplicates many of the IP telephony functions available to workers on their desktop phones Interaction Client, Mobile Edition provides users with presence management, that is, being able to look up the presence of a co-worker; company directory look-up; Microsoft Outlook contact access;...

Executives of Web 2.0 companies and some members of Congress are pressing for a reversal of the Pentagon's decision to block access to several popular Web sites on military networks The decision, abruptly made this week, cuts off troops' access to such sites as YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MT...

Two private equity investors have agreed to acquire Acxiom, a provider of customer data integration technology, data products, database services, IT outsourcing, consulting, analytics, and privacy services ValueAct Capital and Silver Lake, which focuses on large-scale investments in technology-driven growth industries, will purchase 100 percent of ...

Private equity heavyweight the Blackstone Group is taking another publicly traded software company private. It has announced it will purchase Alliance Data Systems for US$7.8 billion, including the assumption of certain debt, or $81.75 per share in cash. That is a premium of 30 percent over the $62.96 share price with which Alliance Data closed the day prior to the announcement...

Oracle has entered the product lifecycle management (PLM) niche with a flourish through its acquisition of best-of-breed vendor Agile Software While there are other active PLM vendors, Agile offers a difficult-to-replicate line of products and functionality that address product innovation and the introduction process; facilitate the sharing of prod...

Citing limited bandwidth and potential security issues, the Pentagon has cut off U.S. troops' access to several social networking and other high-volume Web sites. Soldiers can still post to MySpace and YouTube -- two of the banned sites --but only from outside networks However, most overseas military personnel, including thousands stationed in Iraq...

It has taken some time to assemble the ingredients, but the CRM (customer relationship management) industry is finally poised to deliver robust mobile offerings. If you think you've heard this before, that's because you have -- in 2004, in 2005 and, yes, last year as well To be sure, there are mobile CRM apps available on the market that have attra...

Salesforce.com continues to carve its user base -- and prospective user base -- into finer and finer niches, which it then targets with new products. The rollout of the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com exemplifies that strategy Salesforce.com introduced a contact center application with the rollout of its Winter 07 release, made avai...

RightNow Technologies has introduced its third industry vertical and appears to be poised to introduce a fourth -- in Consumer Goods Products (CGPs) -- in the near future Thus far, the company has focused on industry groups in which it has a strong expertise and a large number of clients, such as higher education, federal government and, with the m...

Talisma has introduced a new version of CIM 8.0, its self-service suite. While this release includes numerous enhancements to the existing product lineup, it also offers something completely new for the suite: a proactive sales feature set that leverages reactive service capabilities introduced in earlier versions "We saw how well companies were us...

Microsoft officially staked a claim in the burgeoning business intelligence market at its first-ever conference devoted to the niche, Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007, taking place in Seattle this week Conference keynoter Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, ticked off the strides Redmond has taken thus far in pre...

For the second time this year, hackers have victimized the University of Missouri. The names and Social Security numbers of 22,396 current or former students who were employed by UM during 2004 may have been compromised, according to university officials The hacker or hackers reportedly gained access to the personal information via a 2004 Web page ...

Kana has pushed into the professional services area with its acquisition ofeVergance Partners, a management consulting and systems integration firm Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to Kana for 2007 and is expected to close during the second quarter of Kana's 2007 fiscal year....

The lawsuit IBM filed against Amazon for multiple patent violations has ended amicably, with Amazon agreeing to pay undisclosed license fees The legal battle over the disputed technologies began with much fanfare last fall, when IBM filed a complaint alleging that Amazon had infringed five of its patents related to e-commerce....

Five9's Virtual Call Center products -- on-demand contact center applications -- are now fully compatible with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. Essentially, what this means is that the system, which requires only a Windows-based PC, Internet connection and headset, can now support Vista Of Five9's nearly 1,000 customers, "multiple" firm...