ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Callidus Muscles Up With ForceLogix – But Can It Step Up to the Plate?

Posted by Mark Smith on 31 December 2010

In a very quiet and very subtle move, Callidus Software (NASDAQ: CALD) has offered to purchase the assets of ForceLogix for about $3.75 million. This sales applications software company provides sales coaching software to help sales managers realize the full value of their sales representatives. In 2010, Callidus Software entered into an OEM agreement to embed ForceLogix within a new offering... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, Sales Coaching, Sales Effectiveness, Sales Operations, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Workforce Performance, Callidus Software, Sales Performance Management

Cisco Finesses Agents with Real Time Support Using Nexidia

Posted by ISG Research on 29 December 2010

Contact centers face a number of challenges beyond simply answering customer calls. Among them are improving customer satisfaction, increasing the number of calls resolved at the first attempt and ensuring agents comply with regulations. But chief among these, my research into contact center analytics shows, is the mandate to reduce the average length of time it takes to complete calls. Doing all... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Nexidia, Operational Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Call Center, Cisco, Contact Center, CRM

The Headquarters Effect and Salesforce.com

Posted by Robert Kugel on 24 December 2010

Wall Street has many leading indicators to work with, some serious – such as housing starts and the purchasing managers’ index – and some done a bit tongue-in-cheek. One of the latter is the Super Bowl Indicator, which says that if a team from the original National Football League wins the game, the market will be up for the year, but if an old American Football League team wins it, the market... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Management

Can Your Sales Force Trust Salesforce.com?

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 December 2010

At the 2010 Dreamforce conference (Twitter #df10) in San Francisco, about 18,000 people gathered to learn about the latest in salesforce.com’s applications and technology. Attendees from sales organizations might have been looking for some depth on the next generation of applications to support their sales processes or what the vendor will do to help sales managers manage, sales reps sell... Read More

Topics: Sales, Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer Service

SAP Plugs a Gap in Financial Filing

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 December 2010

SAP is in the process of acquiring certain financial disclosure management software assets from cundus, a German provider of BI and performance management software. SAP will be buying cundus’ Financial Statement Factory and informationCollector, which together manage the collaborative creation and editing of financial and management reports using both structured and unstructured information. SAP... Read More

Topics: ERP, Financial Applications, Uncategorized, CFO, finance, Financial Performance Management

A New Financial Force in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Research on 15 December 2010

One of the prominent salesforce.com partners on display at the recent Dreamforce in San Francisco was FinancialForce.com. It’s one of a growing list of providers of in-the-cloud accounting and finance packages built on the Force.com platform. Like other of these accounting vendors (such as Compiere, Intacct, Netsuite and - to some extent and eventually– Workday), it aims principally at companies... Read More

Topics: ERP, Financial Applications, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, CFO, finance

Salesforce Analytics Identify a Break in the Clouds

Posted by ISG Research on 15 December 2010

Last week I attended salesforce.com’s Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco (Twitter #DF10). As a user of salesforce applications for the last four years in my previous positions, I was familiar with its analytic capabilities, or lack thereof. Certainly you can accomplish simple reporting and produce dashboards displaying salesforce data, which is adequate for narrowly focused reporting and... Read More

Topics: Sales, Salesforce.com, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer Service, Uncategorized

SAP Energizes CRM with Analytics and Interactions, But Will It Work?

Posted by Mark Smith on 14 December 2010

At the SAP Global Influencer Summit (Twitter #SAPSummit) that I just assessed the company addressed, among many other things, its SAP CRM vision and recent advances. SAP has shifted its focus from standard customer relationship management (CRM) to the customer lines of business where professionals increasingly see that the enterprise customer experience should span channels and processes in... Read More

Topics: SAP, Customer Experience, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Performance, CIO, Customer & Contact Center, Enterprise Software, CRM

The Technology Stack and Innovation: SAP & The Rest

Posted by ISG Research on 14 December 2010

Vishal Sikka raised an important point about the software business during his remarks at the SAP Global Influencer Summit that my colleague just assessed (See: “SAP Elevates Technology Strategy for Enterprise Software and Solutions“). He contrasted the business strategy of consolidation that other companies are pursuing with his view of SAP’s strategy of innovation. In one sense, this assertion... Read More

Topics: SAP, Analytics, CIO, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Mobility, Uncategorized

A friend of ours

Posted by ISG Research on 13 December 2010

A friend of ours, Doug Henschen, showed up in my inbox last week in a new guise. Doug for years edited the TechWeb (and before that CMP) publication Intelligent Enterprise, and in my opinion did a great job of distilling all that was important in BI and the enterprise use of information for competitive advantage. But he isn’t editing IE anymore. Now he’s producing the InformationWeek Enterprise... Read More

Topics: Editorial, Journalism, Uncategorized, News, Publishing

Verint Adds New Dimension to Contact Center Analytics

Posted by ISG Research on 13 December 2010

One of the problems in the contact center and IT worlds is that terms mean different things to different people. Take “contact center” for example. The meaning was clear when it was just the call center because people knew it was a place that centralized the handling of customer phone calls. It became the virtual call center when calls were distributed over multiple sites. Then it became the... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, Cloud Computing, Uncategorized, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Verint

SAP Elevates Technology Strategy for Enterprise Software and Solutions

Posted by ISG Research on 13 December 2010

At this year’s Influencer Summit (Twitter: #SAPSummit) SAP’s executive leadership team summarized the company’s progress in 2010 and described its plans for the coming year in a range of technologies. The event led off with co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe discussing by video from Germany the business and technology areas in which SAP expects growth in 2011. Jim focused SAP’s efforts in on-premises and... Read More

Topics: SAP, Analytics, Business Intelligence, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Mobility

Are Your Electronic Secrets Safe?

Posted by ISG Research on 10 December 2010

Near the top of one of the best columns I’ve read on l’affaire Wikileaks is this assertion: “Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.” Characterizations aside, there’s an issue here that companies are... Read More

Topics: Data Integration, Information Management, Uncategorized

Talend Pushes Boundaries of Open Source Software Model

Posted by ISG Research on 09 December 2010

Talend, a vendor of open source data integration tools, recently announced its acquisition of Sopera, an open source application integration company whose products are based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It simultaneously announced an additional $34 million of funding. As I pondered what the announcements mean, I couldn’t help but think of the bigger picture. Is this entrepreneurial... Read More

Topics: SOA, Talend, Business Intelligence, CIO, Data Integration

NICE Systems Rebrands Smart Desktop for Agents

Posted by ISG Research on 09 December 2010

A few weeks back I wrote about how NICE Systems was venturing into the back office and my surprise that the core smart desktop product it had acquired with eglue, while a key part of this initiative, seemed to have disappeared as a stand-alone offering. Since then NICE has corrected my impression, pointing out that the product is still available in pretty much the same form as always. The problem... Read More

Topics: Customer Experience, NICE Systems, Uncategorized, Call Center, Contact Center, CRM

HP Gives Up on Business Intelligence and Analytics Markets

Posted by Mark Smith on 05 December 2010

No one has seemed to notice that in the last several months, Hewlett-Packard has quietly made changes to its participation in the enterprise software market; this will significantly change HP’s value for CIOs and IT organizations in regards to business intelligence (BI) technologies. Essentially, the change is this: The company has decided to leave the BI market, which includes analytics and data... Read More

Topics: Data Warehousing, IT Performance, IT Research, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Enterprise Software, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), HP, Information Applications, Information Management, HP Neoview

Sustainability and Performance Management

Posted by Robert Kugel on 03 December 2010

Years ago I was given a tour of a company’s factory by the CEO who was credited with engineering its recent turnaround. We were walking along a gallery one story above the shop floor when he pointed down to it and told me that when he first looked down on this scene he saw people dashing madly back and forth. Rather than taking that as a good sign of a busy factory, he said it was a clear... Read More

Topics: Sustainability, Environment Management, Uncategorized, CFO, finance, Green

Forecast: Cloudy

Posted by ISG Research on 02 December 2010

If you’ve walked past a playing TV recently, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed that Microsoft thinks it can profit from “The Cloud.” The folks in Redmond would have you store your pictures there so the family can access them, use it to collaborate over the weekend in a small business – you name it, Cloud Power can do it. The cloud is much discussed in the business arena these days as well, but... Read More

Topics: ERP, Cloud Computing, Data Integration, Uncategorized, CRM

Marching to Different Drummers

Posted by ISG Research on 02 December 2010

A colleague recently asked of an online professional group of which we’re members, “Is your personal computer faster than the one the boss gave you?” While answers are still trickling in, it looks pretty clear that the answer is, “Yes, of course.” Now, we do tend a bit toward the geeky, so there’s a bit of built-in bias. But it also stands to reason that business- and corporate-issued technology... Read More

Topics: Data Integration, Information Management, IT Analytics

The Cutting Edge

Posted by ISG Research on 02 December 2010

Someone slashed the top on my convertible a few days ago in a futile effort to find something of value. He or she got nothing; the perpetrator also managed to cost me at least the $500 deductible and, far worse, throw me into the maw of the monster that is the auto insurance bureaucracy. What will come out the other end still remains to be seen; I’ll keep you posted. But what this unexpected... Read More

Topics: Data Integration, Information Management

SAP Hits Suite Spot for Financial Performance Management

Posted by Robert Kugel on 01 December 2010

Ventana Research recently completed its 2010 Financial Performance Management Value Index of the major financial performance management suites. Financial performance management (FPM) is the process of addressing the often overlapping issues around people, process, information and information technology that affect how well finance organizations operate and support the activities of the rest of... Read More

Topics: SAP, ERP, Financial Applications, Financial Performance, CFO, finance, Financial Performance Management