CRM News Feed

SAP has ratcheted up its campaign to increase its middle market customer base with the rollout of several new applications. At the CeBIT trade fair now taking place in Hannover, Germany, the company introduced an enhanced All-In-One application that offers some 80 micro verticals and is componentized even further for rapid redevelopment by partners and deployment by customers. In addition, SAP announced plans to deliver updates to its Business One product line, designed for the smaller end of the SMB market.

Japan’s Hitachi Information Systems on Thursday announced a new kind of concert entry system that utilizes a tiny mu-chip smart tag to prevent the forging and scalping of tickets. The mu-chip is a tiny Radio Frequency Identification chip made by Hitachi. Hitachi Information Systems already utilizes the mu-chip for its Chipin series of systems to manage the movement of people in and out of rooms, but the majority of these are used in offices.

As business intelligence and analytics hit full stride this year, dashboards are becoming ubiquitous. Typically marketing, sales, operations and, increasingly, quality management departments are all creating their own. Each are populated with their own specific metrics of interest and key performance indicators, yet only a few — in the majority of cases I’ve seen — measure collaboration, responsiveness of one department or division to another’s requirements in the service of customers, or goal attainment based on shared strategies.