Analytics

Shares of Georgia-based data-services provider ChoicePoint jumped by nearly half Thursday over their previous closing price after the firm announced that UK-based publisher and Lexis Nexis owner Reed Elsevier is buying it for $4.1 billion. ChoicePoint stock rose by 43.26 percent, to $48.22 by midday...

An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...

Microsoft may have set its acquisitive sights on Yahoo, but that apparently doesn't mean it's neglecting its own digital advertising platform. In fact, the company on Tuesday demonstrated seven new technologies from Microsoft adCenter Labs. Included among the technologies Microsoft unveiled were alg...

ATG is building out its personalization feature set with the $10 million acquisition of best-of-breed vendor CleverSet. It is the first acquisition the company has made since its $48.3 million eStara deal in 2006. CleverSet is an automated personalization engine delivered in Software as a Service mo...

On the heels of Oracle's successful bid to acquire BEA Systems, SAP has unveiled the first wave of products developed through its own $6.78 billion acquisition of Business Objects last year. It has also revealed more details about its plans to integrate its product suite with the French business int...

The e-commerce market is entering a new period. After an initial phase during which companies focused largely on making their products and services available to potential customers via the Web, users are now trying to take a more comprehensive look at their deployments. Consequently, a new breed of ...

Amazon.com executives and investors had a very merry holiday season as buyers chose the online mall in huge numbers. Amazon said the 2007 holiday season, its 13th, was its best ever in terms of sales. While the Seattle-based e-commerce giant did not reveal final sales figures, it noted customers ord...

While retailers are rich in data, they are struggling to gather information from point-of-sale systems, planning systems and various other locations where customer, vendor and internal data collection take place. Retailers are generally performing poorly in terms of executing analysis and utilizing ...

Online retailers agree that it's better to give than receive, yet they stand to receive more than most. Santa will barely have time to shuck his boots for his slippers before the merchandise misfits begin a return journey to the warehouse to wreak havoc on the season's sales numbers. "The reality is...

The hot segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future. First, Paglo came out last month with a free and open source crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other elect...