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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.

Today’s supply chains know no geographic boundaries. Customers and suppliers are situated throughout the world. To take advantage of this ever-expanding network, consider the following ways to manage a global supply chain more effectively: Prepare a strategy that reflects both outsourcing and insourcing. Success is often determined by how well you define your core competencies and the extent to which you let others handle activities not central to your principal business.

If we are ever to cut through the hype in hopes of determining how good Software as a Service really is, the best way would be to talk to companies that use SaaS. Of course, each application or service must stand on its own, but I’ve been wondering what it is that’s inherent to all or most SaaS applications that makes the model so appealing to midsize and larger companies. Is SaaS a better alternative to on-premises solutions? In some cases, yes, but technology is only part of the story.

Blockbuster Online reportedly is having some serious problems. Some customers have reported that they have not been receiving their movies and that calls to customer service have been “fruitless.” Blockbuster, blaming the problems on technical glitches, appears to be trying to keep the problems under wraps. All in all, this isn’t too surprising. Myriads of companies are rolling out new video services on short timelines, in what seems to be a panic mode, to seize ground and fend off competition in the video wars.

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Telecom equipment maker Nortel is focusing on making India its Asian hub for network managed services. To begin with, the Canada-based vendor has enhanced the capability of its network operations center in New Delhi to make it the Asian NOC for supporting customers in the continent. To cash in on the increase in Internet protocol telephony traffic, especially by BPOs and ITES providers, Nortel is also looking at rolling out proactive voice quality management, which ensures better quality of IP telephony deployments.

Imation says it has a system of tracking tape cartridges using radio frequency identification tags, better known as RFID. RFID tags contain tiny radio transmitters that broadcast prerecorded information. The radio tags are being used to track such things as library books and shipping containers, and RFID chips are embedded in no-swipe credit cards and even the new U.S. passport. Imation is the first data-storage firm to use RFID technology in this way.

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There’s no other series of business processes that are going through more of a transformation today and impacting customer relationships more than order management. These series of processes have gone through multiple owners, first starting with IT who adopted them as a quick way to achieve ERP system consolidation goals. Then they were passed on to the CFO and line-of-business managers as many companies realized that their order management systems had been more of a liability than an asset and needed to deliver on the many commitments their companies have been making to customers.

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An Ohio man whose $3,200 credit card debt mushroomed to $10,700 with interest and fees told his story Wednesday to senators who denounced the industry for confusing billing practices and shifting interest rates. Executives of three major banks defended their credit card practices as responsible and responsive to consumers’ needs in testimony at the hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ investigative subcommittee.

No call should strike more fear into the heart of an online business than a call from a customer saying, “Your site won’t let me do what I want to do.” Chilling words, because only a tiny percentage of online consumers will actually pick up the phone to alert businesses to a problem. By the time that call is received, the business is likely to have lost hundreds, if not millions of dollars in sales. Over the past 10 years, online conversion rates on e-business sites has remained steady — and low — at between 2 and 2 1/2 percent.

Business intelligence is a fast-growing segment area in the on-demand market. BI solutions help enterprises track performance, understand business drivers, and manage an organization’s overall operations. “BI is a large, complex set of technologies, processes and methodologies that address all of the steps necessary to transform raw data into useful, usable, actionable information,” Forrester principal analyst for business intelligence Boris Evelson told CRM Buyer.

Every disruptive innovation requires a minimum of two parties to play the game. There has to be a disruptor — someone who does the disrupting — as well as one or more disruptees — the party or parties being disrupted. Identifying either party is difficult, but for different reasons. The disruptor is usually best identified in hindsight. It is the nature of markets that at any one time there are many competitors who are either the market share leaders or close to the top, or they are challengers.

Your chance of being stuck on a stuffy airliner for hours on a taxiway, like passengers on recent JetBlue flights, increased last year. Passengers on 7,405 planes spent at least two hours — and sometimes much longer — out on airfields waiting to take off. Travelers sat for two to five hours on 7,369 departing flights after leaving the gate — and for more than five hours on 36 others. The total was up from the previous year’s 6,715 but still well under the record 8,115 of the year before that.

It’s not an easy task to summarize the makeup of today’s customer in a singularly defined formula. Not only do customers’ individual needs vary on a case-by-case basis, but as an aggregate whole, customers’ needs are maturing and have become much more complex and demanding than prior generations. Regardless of your industry, what your business really boils down to is your customers, the services you provide them and the rapport your company forms with them in doing so.

Telephone sales, integrated with CRM and sales force automation software, is a powerful sales and marketing program for dealers to help drive higher sales and margins and, at the same time, result in more cost-effective customer coverage. Historically, telephone sales programs have been an option for dealers wanting to lower their cost of sales with smaller customers while maintaining their business. Though this is still a key strategic focus, telephone programs have evolved into a sound new customer development and penetration strategy for medium and sometimes large customers as well.

Electronic advertising boards could soon sense how you react to them and change their display to grab your attention, researchers say. The developers are negotiating to trial the new advertising technology in shops. “We have a concept called ‘agile retail,’” said Mike Wu, who is in charge of the project at government-funded National ICT Australia. “The message will respond to the body of the customer.” The new system is called TABANAR and is aimed at advertisers that want a competitive edge in a world already filled with advertising “noise.”

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When Oracle announced it had agreed to buy the business intelligence vendor Hyperion for $3.3 billion, executives did not waste time explaining one of its motives. “Hyperion is the latest move in our strategy to expand Oracle’s offerings to SAP customers,” Oracle President Charles Phillips stated. “Thousands of SAP customers rely on Hyperion as their financial consolidation, analysis and reporting system of record.” SAP and Oracle have a long-standing rivalry in the ERP space.

Etelos, a provider of open source hosted Web 2.0 applications, has released a beta version of a CRM tool designed to work with Google Apps, a commercial suite of office applications Google introduced last week. The Etelos product is integrated into Google’s platform. The application, called “CRMforGoogle,” includes features to customize modules, automate client follow-up, manage tasks, share schedules and manage projects. It also provides contact- and content-management functionality.

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Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on Monday announced that the software company has acquired Medstory, a Foster City, Calif., healthcare search start-up, for an undisclosed amount. Ballmer publicized the news at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference in New Orleans. He also announced the widespread release of Microsoft’s Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint. The software template is designed to help hospitals and healthcare organizations streamline the way they provide care and manage patient data.

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