IBM has announced that IBM Watson will be put to work towards improving customer satisfaction, as part of its Smarter Commerce initiative.

The artificially intelligent computer is well known for its ability to win Jeopardy and for its advances in assisting medical institutions. More recently, IBM has decided to exploit Watson for its capacity to learn, adapt, and understand a company’s data rapidly. Customer relationship management is a perfect scenario for testing this ability.

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Open source portal provider Liferay invites its global community of users, customers, and partners to participate in the development of new features for Liferay’s products. Liferay’s Ideation initiative is also looking at ways to develop new apps that can be delivered through the Liferay Marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC analysts speculate about developments to come in a variety of enterprise software spaces in the year ahead. (See also P.J. Jakovljevic’s sneak peek at 2013 and Bob Eastman’s look at what’s in store for supply chain.)

Josh Chalifour, Director of Knowledge Services, on enterprise information management:
Across the enterprise software market, cloud-based delivery models are a vector of concern. Demand however has been slow to pick up for these models in enterprise information management spaces. Between 2010 and 2011, we saw demand hover at just over 20 percent of the inquiries we receive from end-user organizations. In 2012 demand moved incrementally higher, to about 26%. Read the rest of this entry »

The following forces and information technology (IT) trends will continue to shape 2013:

1. Cloud Computing
While cloud computing is becoming mainstream, hybrid cloud–on-premises configurations (a.k.a., “software plus services” and “connected services”) remains the reality for cloud integration and federated cross-cloud security issues. Organizations are increasingly looking to hybrid cloud architectures as a way to have a more dynamic computing architecture over time. Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle’s attempt to tackle the customer experience cloud market has been advanced with the new acquisition of cloud-based marketing automation solutions provider Eloqua. Oracle expects to achieve an extensive product, which will help companies market, sell, and support their customers. The solution should be able to offer multi-channel and personalized client interactions. Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle presented new features for its customer experience service platform, RightNow CX Cloud Service. The release allows organizations to engage customers via multiple channels thanks to the newly introduced integration between Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service. Read the rest of this entry »

One year after Infor and Orbis Global teamed up, Infor acquires Orbis Global. Orbis Global started out in Australia and later moved to San Francisco where its headquarters are presently situated. In November 2011 Infor announced a strategic partnership with Orbis Global to enhance its Epiphany customer relationship management (CRM) suite by integrating Orbis Global’s SaaS marketing resource management (MRM) solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Infor has announced the general availability of its Customer Interaction Hub. The solution—built specifically for financial services and telecommunications industries—provides Infor CRM Epiphany Suite users with an organized structure for storing and making visible customer interactions. As part of Infor’s effort to enhance customer experience, the hub displays all client interactions to ensure adequate customer dialogues. Infor’s initiative underlines that they do not intend to neglect their Infor CRM Epiphany Suite in favor of its Saleforce app, Inforce Suite.

The announcement that KANA Express, a cloud customer service offering, was selected by Rent.com for improved customer engagement was one of more important announcements preceding the recently held KANA Connections 2012 user conference in Las Vegas, where about 180 attendees were able to hear more about the importance of consistent customer experience via multiple channels of communication. Read the rest of this entry »

The best way to capture customer experience is without a doubt the ability to interpret real customer sentiment, which is reason enough for Medallia to include text analytics capabilities to its already well-known Customer Experience Management Suite (CEM).

Points of note: this offering integrates fully with Medallia’s CEM solution. The vendor touts its ease of use, as well as the ability for users to acquire fast results and distribute these results across the organization.

In this regard, Borge Hal, CEO and co-founder of Medallia says that “for years, many companies have struggled to effectively understand text-based customer feedback. Companies that lack text analytics solutions devote significant resources to manually summarizing the feedback—they’re engaged in the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack.”

Business intelligence and analytics tools are following an interesting path—either by going vertical, or by being embedded as complementary tools for other business suites. Analytic tools can be now more at the center of the action. You can read the actual press release here.

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