Analytics

Cyberdefenders for years have adopted Fort Apache strategies to protect their networks. Strong perimeters could prevent attackers from reaching precious data, they reasoned. As technology marched on, however, the idea of an impermeable wall became as quaint as the Maginot Line on the eve of World Wa...

I was doing a little reading about the concept of the customer journey. I have distinct opinions about it, and I was looking for things that might challenge or validate those ideas when I stumbled across a blog post from a major CRM vendor that got my goat. The post proclaimed that 2015 was "the Yea...

Bill Clinton won the presidency with the mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," and I think CRM could borrow heavily from that pithy bit of logic. If you can check your preconceptions at the door and actually perceive the information in front of you, there's no telling what you can figure out. Such is ...

Apple and IBM last week announced an initiative with Japan Post Group to provide seniors in Japan with iPads preloaded with apps and analytics designed to improve their quality of life. Japan Post Group will launch a pilot service later this year and gradually expand it to cover 4-5 million customer...

Customers are changing the rules of business. They are well informed and well connected, and they have high expectations. Whether making a purchase, booking a restaurant, or searching for information, they demand intelligent digital interactions.

Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified...

You can tell when the economy is doing well, because instead of worrying about how you're going to make the next mortgage payment, you worry about the next disruption in business. The big worry on the horizon now is the digital disruption, a nice piece of alliteration designed to make you question y...

In an earlier chapter in my career, I had the seemingly lofty title of "software and intelligence editor" at a telecommunications industry trade magazine. Even back in 1996, telecom was experiencing a "big data" problem. It wasn't a problem of collection -- no, telephone companies collect more data ...

Now that cloud computing has made it economically feasible to capture and collate large volumes of data, many organizations are trying to find an equally economical method to analyze and move the data across various business applications. The rapidly escalating demands for powerful analytic tools to...

Oracle last week trumpeted a set of new Marketing Cloud features designed to improve the customer experience. Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect aim to boost sales by aggregating data from multiple sources and reacting to it in near-realtime. However, they fall short of the cutti...