Expert Advice

TCO is a financial estimate that helps enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a system. TCO goes beyond the initial purchase price or implementation cost to consider the full cost of an asset over its useful life. TCO and ROI are frequently confused and misused, but they actually...

The Apple iTunes App Store has generated revenue of more than $400 million revenue since its launch, according to analyst firm Piper Jaffray. Aside from being a successful online e-commerce solution for customers, the App Store has spurred tremendous innovation by Apple's development partners, which...

For all the talk of social CRM, there's not so much talk of social CRM successes. Oh, sure -- there are scattered success stories, but there's not a wave of SCRM home runs being hit out there. As a result, there's been talk of SCRM having "jumped the shark" or "outlived its hype." In talking to user...

This year's holiday shopping season is poised to break e-commerce records as consumers accelerate their spending online. More consumers are very likely to purchase their holiday gifts online (58 percent) than at brick-and-mortar stores (41 percent) this year, according to Channel Advisor. And more t...

Well, it's November again. And in addition to gearing up for turkeys, pumpkin pie and football, those of us in IT know it's time to gear up for something else, something probably much less pleasant: our annual budget cycle. It's time once again for us to enter into days-long deliberation sessions ...

In life and in business, the old saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" fundamentally could apply to everything -- except when it comes to display advertising. Remarketing has disproved that old adage time and time again by affording just that: a second chance to reinforc...

For many small businesses, the challenges associated with network integration can actually put a stop to integration before it gets started. Concerns about cost, worries about the potential of business downtime and fears of implementation issues can lead businesses to put off both minor and long ov...

According to the Small Business Administration, fewer than 30 percent of startups are still in business after 10 years. This is a pretty startling failure rate -- over 70 percent. Let's take a look at some of the causes of startup failure and what can be done to improve your chances of making your n...

I have a confession to make: I'm a tokenization junky. I live and breathe tokenization, and have been for a few years now. Since I'm serving as lead chair on the PCI Security Standards Council's Tokenization Working Group, it's my job to know everything about tokenization that's going on in the indu...

Over the past year, the IT world has seemingly fallen head over heels for the cloud. Cloud computing has great potential in terms of collaboration and efficiency, and it's already delivering strong results for organizations that have leveraged the cloud model. For all the hype, though, it's importan...