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NetSuite CRM+ is a customer relationship management tool that provides users with more than just standard customer service functionality. NetSuite's system gives users the capability to run their entire business by providing a single view of the customer "NetSuite provides a complete business management suite," Paul Turner, the company's senior dir...

Google and Sony vs. Microsoft, and a Touch of Wikileaks Insanity Last week was rather interesting. Both Google and Sony were talking trash numbers in competitive comments against Microsoft. Google was arguing that up to 60 percent of enterprises were ready to go to Chrome OS, and Sony was creating the impression that it had sold 4.1 million PS3 Move products. ...

Though evidence abounds of cloud computing moving from the hype stage to successful adoption and deployment, many enterprises are still not clear on how to adopt cloud and make it part of their enterprise IT strategies. This is in part due to a misperception about what cloud computing is and the number of myths that still exist today about the clo...

Future generations always hold promise, but for Verizon Wireless, a fourth-generation mobile broadband network is proving both promising -- and perilous With speeds Verizon promises will be "up to 10 times faster than the company's 3G network," the 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) Mobile Broadband network launches December 5 amid concerns about pricing...

When Larry Ellison introduced new servers and clusters at the old Sun Microsystems auditorium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Thursday, he poked fun at competitors IBM and HP, depicting Oracle as a cheetah, IBM as a stallion and HP as a turtle. He noted that HP products are slow and the company is vulnerable in the marketplace The SPARC Supercluste...

Google is tightening its copyright and piracy protection procedures, instituting new measures that will facilitate Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests and will better oversee search advertisers that use copyrighted or trademarked terms One important goal is to bring Google's response time to such issues to 24 hours or less, according...

Aberdeen surveyed 240 users and managers of IT support to find out how organizations in this new world can ensure that workers are productive and customers enjoy their products. The 107 support managers who responded to Aberdeen's survey ranked the metrics they use to evaluate their IT support staff on a scale from one to five, where 1 was the highest priority and 5 the lowest.

Among the many announcements that will no doubt be emanating from Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference next week will be this: TreeHouse Interactive, a SaaS partner relationship management provider, will join AppExchange. When it does, it will provide the first independent PRM offering on the site, outside of Salesforce.com's own PRM functionality...

The security community was horrified when it learned about Stuxnet, the worm designed to eat into industrial control systems, or SCADA systems, that was purportedly targeted at Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor Not only was the worm highly sophisticated, but it also targeted a SCADA system from Siemens whose embedded password was well known....

With a much-anticipated NASA announcement Thursday, "The Devil in the Dark" is no longer the name of actor William Shatner's favorite original "Star Trek" episode, about a man-eating subterranean monster made ofcells based on silicon rather than carbon Rather, it's a newly discovered bacteria called "Strain GFAJ-1" from a common bacterial family, G...

BlackBerry device maker Reserach In Motion on Thursday announced that it plans to buy Swedish design house TAT, the firm that designed the T-Mobile G1 Android smartphone's user interface (UI) "The TAT team will remain as a group in their current location and become part of RIM's global software development team," David Yach, RIM's chief technology ...

Google announced Wednesday it has changed its search algorithm to make sure bad merchants don't soar to the top of search results due to strings of complaints against them. The decision to alter its algorithm was a response to a story The New York Times ran last weekend about an eyeglass merchant, DecorMyEyes.com, that encouraged negative reviews in order to get higher rankings. At the time, the Times story appeared, the eyeglass company was showing up on the first page of Google's search results...

The bones of a plan to balance consumer privacy and businesses' need to gather data online was aired yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission and was greeted with both praise and criticism In a 122-page preliminary report, the agency called for any company collecting or using consumer data that can be linked to a specific consumer, computer or dev...

Having an actively engaged, independent board is a must for the long-term viability of any corporation. Unfortunately, there are still many management teams that feel that their prospects for long-term employment, as well as generous salaries and perks, are dependent upon a "friendly" board of directors composed mostly of friends and associates His...

All I wanted to do was save a little money. Is that too much to ask? We have been hearing about the holiday shopping season for months. Bargains galore are finally here. So I decided to try something I never tried before. I went to check out the Black Friday sales at the local stores the morning after Thanksgiving. Yes, before sunrise. Actually in the middle of the night. Someone should have braced me for what I experienced. This was a raw, shop-a-holic, food-fighting frenzy.

Part 1 of this two-part series looks at the importance of leveraging social media contextually in the banking industry. The example of a credit card is used to illustrate how social media can be used at each stage of the generic buying process to establish a connect with customers, starting with the first stage: Need Recognition and Problem Awareness. The remaining four stages are addressed in this installment...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" ...

Apple's iPad has had the tablet market to itself for eight months now, but that's about to change. Leading the charge on the electronic slate's logy perch is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a seven-inch tablet running Google's Android operating system Rather than take on the iPad head-to-head, Samsung decided to set its tablet apart from Apple's by making ...

The Apple iPad, rather than Amazon's Kindle, will likely benefit most from the strong demand for e-readers, according to a recent ChangeWave Research report The ChangeWave survey of more than 2,800 consumers found that 47 percent are interested in the Kindle, a 15-point drop from a similar survey in August. Meanwhile, 32 percent are interested in t...

The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe of Google for allegedly discriminating against competing search services by restricting its advertising partners from placing ads on their sites. It also is investigating whether Google has restricted advertisers from moving their data to competing ad services It is one of the broadest regulator...