Analytics

It's general practice to have multiple sales forecasts, and that typically means low and upside potential as well as what's committed -- but the idea of teasing those threads apart only at forecasting time might be old school and no longer applicable. Long before you compile a forecast, you have a g...

The explosive growth of data is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry, and a growing number of cloud service providers are recognizing that they can provide more than just simple storage and economical compute power to their customers buried in ...

There's no shortage of utopian visions in the IT industry, but the journey to cloud computing that some folks espouse makes the trip to Shangri-La look like a simple walk in the park. Even in the best circumstances businesses must continue to support legacy applications and systems while they are ad...

Salesforce.com will shell out $350 million in common stock for RelateIQ in a deal expected to close by October. It will provide another $40 million dollars in stock for its cash balance. RelateIQ will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, according to an SEC filing. Many of Salesforce's pa...

Blackbaud recently upgraded its cloud-based eTapestry fundraising application with tools addressing what seems to be a perennial problem in CRM -- dirty data. The ultimate goal of the upgrades for the application, which is designed for nonprofits, is to improve the quality of donor information. The ...

Zendesk has rolled out a new analytics and data visualization tool that sits on top of its flagship customer service platform. Called "Zendesk Insights," it is available to the company's Plus and Enterprise users. "One thing we have been hearing from our customers is that they want more access to th...

I don't know anyone who was ever great at sales forecasting. This is not to say that it can't be done, but it's a hard problem -- like forecasting the weather. Today, we can get weather forecasts for many days in advance with temperatures accurate within a few degrees, because we've invested in many...

Successful companies today run largely on data and analytics. The more precisely you can measure the various aspects of your business, the better you can fine-tune its performance. With e-commerce companies especially, everything can be measured, which has provided some amazing opportunities to impr...

SAP's recent Sapphire NOW user and partner conference in Orlando was a love fest for the company's HANA in-memory database technology. SAP has made it quite clear that HANA is far more than an innovative solution for Big Data, analytics and business intelligence workloads. In fact, HANA and compleme...

Like a lot of people in tech, I was really excited to see President Obama get elected. It seemed like he got technology, and he used it brilliantly in two campaigns. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to use it well in actually running the government. From the Affordable Health Care Act to the Veteran...