Dennis Callaghan

While analyzing customer relationships is key to consumer-facing industries such as retail, businesses that sell to other businesses are increasingly using sophisticated analytics as well. Whether its reining in costs to improve efficiency or finding valuable information in data, business-to-business companies are turning to advanced data and text mining, as well as analytical CRM (customer […]

SAS Institute Inc. is making its strongest push yet to capture mind share of chief financial officers under pressure to meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. With Sarbanes-Oxleys initial filing deadline less than a month away, on Nov. 15, SAS last week at its BetterManagement Live conference here released its Financial Intelligence […]

Siebel Systems Inc. returned to profitability in its third quarter after reporting a loss in the same period a year ago, but fell just short of reversing a quarterly revenue decline that has entered its fourth year. The CRM software market leader reported net income of $19.4 million in the period ended Sept. 30, compared […]

BOSTON—Microsoft Corp. announced Tuesday an early beta of a new rich client for its Live Communications Server product designed to unite instant messaging with telephony and video, and to embed such technologies in other applications. Code-named “Istanbul,” the company is demonstrating the new Office-based technology at the Fall 2004 VON conference here this week and […]

Web analytics services and software have grown beyond simply reporting what page was clicked on and how long a visitor stayed there to offer more advanced functions that retailers seeking to increase online sales are finding indispensable. Options from Coremetrics Inc. and others are enabling retailers to make site adjustments on the fly, manage online […]

SAS Institute last week launched Version 3.0 of its SAS Supplier Relationship Management suite. In this version, the business intelligence software company is splitting the product into four modules to let customers manage costs and phase in deployments of the software. The modules include Spend Analysis, for analyzing how much is being spent and on […]

The hyped-up heyday of e-commerce may have come and gone, but service offerings remain for companies that want to take advantage of the Web as a sales channel. Hosted business application service provider NetSuite Inc. late last week announced Version 10 of its namesake application service with special features intended to support e-commerce activities such […]

LOS ANGELES—Siebel Systems Inc., under the leadership of new CEO Mike Lawrie, is rededicating itself to ensuring enterprises success at implementing, deploying and managing its market-leading but complex CRM software applications. The company, at its annual User Week customer conference here this week, unveiled a new plan designed to ease implementation headaches and speed user […]

Salesnet Inc. is readying application services that are designed to make the companys hosted sales force automation applications more efficient and cost-effective. The new offerings, available soon under the “Customer Success Roadmap” umbrella, are designed to appeal to larger enterprises. Key to the new offerings are professional services for performing quarterly audits on how successful […]

The Mike Lawrie era at Siebel Systems Inc. is known around the company as Siebel 2.0, with Lawrie having replaced founding CEO Tom Siebel earlier this year. Lawrie presides over his first Siebel User Week in Los Angeles next week, and attendees should notice the change. Along with Sheryl Crow replacing 80s leftovers Huey Lewis […]