John Taschek

Ten years ago, supercomputers were multimillion-dollar systems usually used for massive projects, such as modeling Earths climate or nuclear reactions. Today, they are called HPCCs, or high-performance computing clusters, and they are basically free when built from spare PCs. More important, they are quickly becoming suitable for mainstream enterprise computing. HPCCs look completely different from […]

Believe it. Grid computing is on its way. But even though the case for grids is strong, it may be years before were able to reap the benefits of grid processing. Corporations are finally figuring out that the pervasive Pentium IIIs- and 4-based systems in most organizations are overkill for doing word processing and spreadsheets. […]

Intuit made history with TurboTax this year. for the first time, a company that commonly gives its software away for free tried to force its customers into a restrictive activation scheme. Intuit buckled after receiving a barrage of complaints and a couple of lawsuits, giving the official excuse that the company did not realize the […]

It all comes down to the big TOE. Thats what PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway says, anyway. Conways TOE is the “total ownership experience,” a fuzzy concept that Conway made a big fuss over at the recent PeopleSoft Leadership Summit in Las Vegas. Conway said TOE was as important an announcement as the unveiling of the […]

Midmarket companies take a hard line on technology spending, just like everyone else: Vendors have to prove to these companies that the technology they offer will cut costs or boost top-line growth. Nothing else will be considered. Realizing this, CRM (customer relationship management) vendors still do what theyve always done—waffle. They see the potential volume […]

Who else besides me is tired of hearing CIOs blame everyone but themselves for their organizations IT failures? CIOs have three purposes in life: to define the vision, work with the CFO on the budget and communicate the vision to the staff. Finger pointing is not included. But invariably, CIOs decry everything from expensive software […]

Perhaps because they have been around longer, established customer relationship management players PeopleSoft Inc., SalesLogix, SAP AG and Siebel Systems Inc. have more clearly defined integration strategies than their . However, eWEEK Labs analysis shows that each of these vendors takes a fundamentally different integration and midmarket approach with its packaged CRM application. eWEEK believes […]

Of all the midmarket CRM packages we tested, UpShot is the only one that provides seamless integration with desktop applications, its own modules and back-office applications. Were it not for a moderately kludgy interface and some suspect performance numbers, UpShot would be about as perfect a solution as one can get in the hosted CRM […]

Bucking the trend in the CRM space is Salesnet, a hosted CRM service provider that barely provides any CRM functionality—and is proud of it. Instead, Salesnet focuses on SFA (sales force automation). Although CRM and SFA are inextricably linked, there are differences between the two: SFA is all about getting sales employees running efficiently, and […]

Salesforce.com, a finalist in this years Excellence Awards program, is among the most complete CRM packages weve tested and is especially well-thought-out for the hosted space. Salesforce.com turned in best-of-class performance in a benchmark that Keynote Systems Inc. ran for us and had 100 percent uptime during the testing phase—the only ASP we tested that […]

Compared with other midmarket hosted CRM solutions, NetLedgers application is in a class by itself—a position that opens it up to unrelenting attacks by its competitors. NetLedger has evolved its eponymously named application from an accounting and math package to part of a fully functional CRM package: NetSuite, released last December. eWEEK Labs tested NetSuite […]

Microsofts much-bally-hooed MS-CRM 1.0 has shown itself to be a good Version 1 CRM product. It has its quirks and architectural limitations, but, overall, it is a sophisticated application. Microsoft has also shown that it is moving quickly in this space. A major quirk that popped up in MS-CRMs e-mail tracking system (the system tagged […]