The Week in Review 3/7/03
A recent Gartner survey reveals that 42 percent of the total number of CRM software licenses bought by businesses goes unused. More often than not businesses purchase more licenses than they need for one of three reasons, according to Gartner. One reason is that the software vendor offers a larger discount if the business increases its initial purchase.
Another reason is that the software vendor may want to position new modules in the market and offers a reduced license fee to businesses that take additional licenses, and may include free or heavily discounted modules. "Buying more software licenses than needed may seem like a wise investment in the short term, but over time it costs more," Beth Eisenfeld, research director for Gartner, said in a statement. "Through 2005 businesses that continue to buy more CRM software licenses than they need, and those that deploy less than they purchase will incur a 20 percent to 30 percent increase in total cost-of-ownership compared to businesses that carefully plan their CRM software license purchases."
U.S. companies are spending their IT dollars more wisely than their European counterparts, according to a survey of more than 10,000 companies released this week by ROI consulting firm Alinean. "U.S. companies have made a major shift that puts them far out ahead. They're using U.S. corporate culture and IT to enable strategic sourcing, outsourcing labor, and cutting labor costs by more than 95 percent over the past decade, to $1.50 an hour," Alinean President and CEO Tom Pisello said in a statement. "At the same time they're keeping crucial R&D work in-house, concentrating the bulk of information management investments on knowledge-capital growth and retention--focusing IT spending on the resources that matter."
Keynote Systems, a Web-performance optimization firm, announced the launch of a new online community to serve the needs of IT professionals and e-business executives. Keynote created the Keynote User Group, hosted at forum.keynote.com, as an open Internet forum designed to encourage a broad sharing of knowledge among IT peers who care about Web performance. Additionally, the online forum allows Keynote experts to disseminate business and technical best-practices tips, tricks, and ideas.
E.piphany has been listed in the leader quadrant in two Gartner CRM Magic Quadrant research notes released in February 2003. For the third consecutive year E.piphany was placed as the sole leader in the E-Marketing Magic Quadrant, and has remained the only leader since the report's inception. E.piphany also retained its position as the only CRM suite vendor to be placed in the leader on Gartner's Customer Relationship Optimization (CRO) Magic Quadrant. Gartner Magic Quadrants provide a snapshot of how vendors perform in relation to each other, and gauge where the overall market is headed. It was created to help customers make better-informed purchasing decisions.
CRM provider Astea International has announced the appointment of Nicholas Remzi to the new position of sales and marketing director, Europe.
Extended Systems, provider of mobile information management solutions for the enterprise, announced Monday the appointment of Charles Jepson as vice president of Extended Systems' worldwide sales and marketing.
Bill Raduchel has rejoined Chordiant's Board of Directors, the company says.
Sedona Corp., a provider of Web-based CRM for the financial services market, has appointed Victoria Looney, cofounder of Copy.doc, a secure document management firm, to its board of directors.