Spotlight Features

Indian call centers are being purchased by U.S. and Canadian companies seeking to quickly gain access to call center services offshore, particularly outbound services. Although media attention focuses more on the sale of U.S. assets to Asian and Middle Eastern firms, this trend in the other directi...

With cell phones now becoming popular fixtures among the masses, securing coverage in even the most remote geographic areas has become an important goal for service providers. Cell towers are expensive, however, costing from US$100,000 to more than $1 million to set up, and present logistical proble...

Last week, Apple became a tentative Windows platform OEM with its announcement of Boot Camp, which allows new Mac hardware to run Windows XP and, eventually, Vista. Apple had said it wasn't planning to support Windows -- just like it said it didn't plan to support Intel or bring out flash-based medi...

Spending the last week traveling through Australia, visiting a manufacturer, giving presentations and talking with several other companies after my presentations has been fascinating. What's so refreshing about Australian manufacturers' approach to using enterprise software for selling, serving and...

The typical picture of a hacker has often been one of an introverted, misunderstood teen with a great deal of repressed anger. Launching an attack and disabling thousands of computers somehow seems to compensate for those feelings. Increasingly, however, while the hacker profile remains much the sam...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service, market. In no particular order the company announced its version 11.0 release, informed the world that this release is fully AJAX infused, introduced a scripti...

When Integrated Direct needed to drive registrations for one of its clients' New York City events, the company included popular social networking site MySpace.com in its online marketing initiatives. "Online registrations doubled compared to previous years just by using MySpace and some other simila...

The relationship between CRM vendor and its channel ecosystem has slowly been changing over the last two years, driven by a number of industry trends. Once seen almost as a commodity, a vendor's ecosystem -- its resellers, independent software vendors, systems integrators with certifications for the...

E-mail marketers anxious to see that their opt-in mailings are not mistaken for spam are finally seeing brighter days, new research suggests. While the journey to the customer's inbox is getting easier, however, passive marketers will face tough challenges from smart competitors who are quickly lear...

I spent a lot of time last week reading the Microsoft employee blogs and apparently there is some reasonably strong feeling among many folks who work there that the wrong "Steve" is running the company. This is, in my view, a "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" type of perception -- s...