Expert Advice

As the prolific trend of adoption would suggest, the case for cloud is compelling from both a business and technology perspective. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the more compelling reasons from a technologist's point of view has to do with the ability to abstract lower levels of...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

The combination of the polymorphic nature of malware, failure of signature-based security tools, and massive amounts of data and traffic flowing in and out of enterprise networks is making threat management using traditional approaches virtually impossible. Until now, security has been based largely...

Because of the rapid pace of SaaS adoption, many security practitioners have found themselves scrambling to ensure the security of the specific technologies their enterprises want to employ. However, the dynamics of SaaS can make this a challenging exercise. This is because most of the options for s...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence...

By now, most organizations have adopted cloud. Increased and widespread adoption as well as expansion of existing deployments are reflected in recent surveys. This suggests that if you're a technology pro and your organization is like most, you've already spent considerable time addressing how to fi...

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. Customer retention isn't flashy, and it doesn't earn extra pats on the back from executives or big promotions -- which...

Social customer service has now become a key point of contact between brands and their customers. Consumers, particularly within the Millennial demographic, take to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks when they have a problem with a company. Sixty percent of 18-24 year olds go to social medi...

For most technologists in the enterprise nowadays, cloud is a pretty big deal -- and securing it can be an even bigger deal still. Security was the top concern of 46 percent of respondents to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners. While this number is actually down from last year's 55 pe...