Analyst Perspectives

In an unexpected announcement this morning, IBM announced its intent to acquire Varicent to enter the sales performance management market. For IBM this is a strategic acquisition, since it did not have any significant or dedicated applications for sales. IBM intends to acquire and place Varicent within the IBM Business Analytics group, which develops similar analytics and performance management application for other line of business and IT organizations.

Managing contact centers typically includes five areas: communications management, workforce optimization, business applications such as CRM, analytics and customer experience management. Last year I wrote about how inContact has evolved from a communications provider to sell a contact center in the cloud that supports most of those requirements. Its products cover communications (ACD, CTI, Dialer and IVR), workforce optimization (Quality Management, Workforce Management and eLearning, which...

The increasing volume of information within enterprises and on the Internet requires businesses to be smarter and more efficient in how they use it. One large challenge is navigating through information and access to the data underlying key business documents in a way that people actually think and operate. The traditional technology approach is defining a data model with a database and then mapping the data to it and is not capable of dealing with data from diverse unstructured information...

If they haven’t done so yet, businesses ought to become acquainted with two relatively new concepts: customer experience management (CEM) and voice of the customer (VOC). Ventana Research defines CEM as the practice of managing the customer experience at all touch points regardless of the communications channel being used. To manage that experience, three types of systems are directly helpful: smart desktop technology to help employees deliver great experiences to customers as they are...

Businesses’ strategic imperative to optimize human capital is creating significant energy in the market for applications used to attract, optimize and retain talent. Amid all the recent acquisitions and changes that I have been writing about in this field, SumTotal Systems seems to get less attention than its size and the reach of its business merit. The company has more than 45 million users, with more than 15 million of them operating in a cloud computing environment spanning more than 3,500...

A desktop or laptop computer is an essential tool for people who carry out customer-facing activities, especially contact center agents. My benchmark research into the use of technology in contact centers shows that agents may have to use eight systems or even more to handle a simple interaction, and I heard of one case where agents had to navigate 50 screens within one application to close a sale. This all takes time, often leads to errors, frustrates the agent and undermines the customer...

Salesforce has begun to toot its marketing horn about its new capabilities for performance management through its acquisition of Rypple, a provider of software designed for social collaboration for improving employee engagement. I have already discussed this acquisition (See: Salesforce.com looking for a Successful Rypple in Human Capital Management) and have actually signed up for and used the software. Rypple has introduced some great innovations to promote feedback and dialogue between...

New human capital management solutions are entering the market, aiming to simplify recruiting, hiring, onboarding and managing employees. Many such applications focus on talent management for use after employees are hired, but vendors also need to streamline tasks for recruiters, HR administrators and hiring managers. Jobscience provides software that simplifies the processes of getting the talent you want to hire ready to work as quickly as possible.

As a technology, predictive analytics has existed for years, but adoption has not been widespread among businesses. In our recent benchmark research on business analytics among more than 2,600 organizations, predictive analytics ranked only 10th among technologies they use to generate analytics, and only one in eight of those companies use it. Predictive analytics has been costly to acquire, and while enterprises in a few vertical industries and specific lines of business have been willing to...

Saba this week announced its acquisition of Human Concepts, which provides applications and tools for understanding and interacting with employees through visualizations based on the organizational chart. Human Concepts had expanded its portfolio beyond tools to support planning and change processes critical for organizational succession and transition. The company has more than 500 customers worldwide, including partners like Infor, Oracle and SAP.