Oracle Adds RightNow to Its Cloud Collection
February 21, 2012
Remember when Oracle was grousing about the cloud. Well, the company has gone bonkers for digital meteorology, excelling in cloud moves.
Have you been wondering what Oracle will do with RightNow? Oracle purchased the maker of cloud-based customer service software last fall for about $1.5 billion. ComputerWorld reports, “Oracle Outlines Plans for RightNow Integration.” Writer Chris Kanaracus checked out an Oracle webcast on the subject; he states:
Oracle executives outlined the company’s bid to reinvent the notion of CRM (customer relationship management) software, discussing how RightNow’s applications will work as part of a continuum involving Oracle technologies for e-commerce, natural language search, customer segmentation and other areas, many of which it also procured through acquisitions.
Specifically, RightNow’s applications will fit at the end of the customer experience chain, tracking product usage, maintenance, and recommendation scenarios. Before that, Oracle has the life of a sale covered. FatWire helps consumers research purchase decisions; Social Network and Siebel Marketing help target marketing endeavors; Endeca provides search technology used to find a product; and ATG Commerce furnishes the e-commerce foundation to complete the purchase. The company’s financial and supply chain software follow, leading the transaction to RightNow’s doorstep.
Oracle intends to make these integrations very soon, though no date has been given.
Founded in 1997, RightNow operates out of Montana with a client roster that is almost 2,000 organizations strong. It’s official mission: to “rid the world of bad experiences.” Now that’s the way to aim high. With Oracle’s acquisition of the quirky Taleo, storm fronts are on the move.
Cynthia Murrell, February 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Customer Service: Where Are Search Vendors?
February 20, 2012
To answer the question, search vendors are actually doing better than we expected.
Search vendors are forever chasing customer support clients, but what about the vendors’ own customer support? InfoWorld asks, “Which IT Vendors Offer the Best and Worst Customer Service?” The article reports on a survey recently conducted by the Temkin Group. Writer Ted Samson explains:
Tech vendors looking to bounce back from the recession might consider investing a few more dollars in improving customer service. According to a survey of IT professionals, most tech companies are offering merely an adequate customer service experience. Yet IT shops tend to steer their limited budget dollars toward vendors that offer not just the best products, but also the best customer service experiences. Even as large enterprise providers consolidate, IT still has clout — and is using it.
There were some intriguing results. The worst of the bunch included Fujitsu, which not only powers Perfect Search, but through its partnership with OpenText also affects Fulcrum Biometrics, Nstein, Collections Server (formerly BASIS), Livelink Discovery Server (formerly BRS), and others.
Microsoft’s business applications took number one (Fast), with IBM (OmniFind, Content Analytics) placing third. Other noteworthy rankings: Oracle at number eight, HP (Autonomy) at number nine, and Google just failed to make the top ten at number eleven.
Interesting. And what about those out of date Web pages and “press one if…” messages.
Cynthia Murrell, February 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Attivio Embraces Customer Support
February 14, 2012
MarketWatch declares, “Attivio IT Knowledge Expert Solution Improves Support Staff Service Performance and Reduces Cost-Per-Ticket.” Noting the bevy of information sources IT staff have to root through, Attivio presents their tailored data management software as the solution. The press release tells us:
IT Knowledge Expert connects the dots between the multiple databases and repositories used by IT support specialists to resolve incidents, identify problem-solving root causes, manage system changes and avoid “system collisions” in ways traditional solutions cannot match,’ said Sid Probstein, Attivio CTO. ‘Our customers are seeing reductions in mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) of up to 40%, as well as significant improvements in cost-per-ticket and customer satisfaction.’
Sounds like it could be promising. Attivio is not the first to apply their information wizardry to the IT sector; many search vendors seek revenue there. Will Oracle and other dominant players fight back? Probably.
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine has won a number of awards for its delivery of actionable information. The highly customizable platform pulls and analyzes data from a wide variety of sources. We have seen a number of vendors use the phrase “connect the dots.” Do these systems connect dots or merely provide a collection of dots which a human must assemble?
Cynthia Murrell, February 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New CEO at Yahoo Axes Customer Support
February 4, 2012
Digg asks, “Under New Leadership, Will Yahoo Find Its Way?” Our view: nope. The CEO shuffle doesn’t seem to have helped the waning company the last three times they tried it.
Installed January 9, Scott Thompson is Yahoo’s newest captain. The article reports:
Thompson, who was previously president of eBay’s PayPal unit, might be Yahoo’s last hope for becoming relevant again as a player in online display advertising, a market which the media company once dominated. Private equity firms and others — such as Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.com — had recently been showing an interest in buying Yahoo, which had been evaluating a number of strategic options.
The company’s challenges revolve around an identity crisis, asserts the write up. Could the frequent leadership turnover has anything to do with that?
With his technical background, Thompson is a unique choice for the Yahoo CEO chair. Perhaps that will help him succeed where others have not. A priority for the new boss, he has said, is to balance customer and merchant needs, something he worked on at PayPal.
How does the new Yahoo CEO deal with sagging revenues? Navigate to “Flickr Lays Off Highest Level of Customer Support.” We learned:
Yahoo has laid off at least five employees at Flickr, including the highest level of customer support: the people who fix bugs like the mistake that obliterated power user Mirco Wilhelm’s 3,400-odd photos last year.
Thompson will have to take more substantive action if the company hopes to catch up with outfits like Facebook and Google. Investors and users are unhappy, so the great turn-around may have a narrow window.
Cynthia Murrell, February 4m 2912
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Free Services Can Be Costly
January 22, 2012
I stumbled upon a interesting post where blogger Tyler Nichols lamented the way that customers mistreat and inherently devalue free services in the article “I am Done with the Freemium Business Model.”
According to the post, Nichols obtained this opinion after creating a free Letter from Santa site over this Christmas holiday. Despite the 1,000,000 page views and 50,000 free Santa letters created, Nichols noticed that his customers refused to follow simple directions and fagged his follow up thank you letter as spam.
Nichols concluded:
Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers. I think it’s because they aren’t paying, they show little or no attention to directions. I focused on making the UI of the site drop dead simple and easy to use. I created a pretty thorough FAQ to answer 99.9% of the questions people might have. I even linked to the FAQ in the email response they got with their download links to the letter they created. I still had hundreds of free customers ask for help with simple questions that were answered in the FAQ.
It’s no surprise that paying customers place a higher value on their products and services than the one’s that receive it for free. But we wonder if this frustration over the freemium business model will inevitably spill over into open source search. We are monitoring, which is a free activity.
Jasmine Ashton, January 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google and Customer Service
December 13, 2011
Now here’s an interesting view of Google. Ars Technica reports, “How effective is the Google Apps support ecosystem? The customers speak.” The article was prompted by the implementation of a new phone support system aimed at business and education users. The feature is to provide support for issues with its core services like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar.
Writer Jon Brodkin notes that a dedicated phone line could be a great leap forward from the haphazard mix of support options Google has offered in the past. The article asserts:
Google’s reputation on customer support has never been stellar, so we decided to talk to a few Google Apps business and education customers to find out how good or bad it is in real life. The answers ranged from ‘We’ve never had to call support’ to ‘their tech support sucks.’ In the middle ground, several customers told us Google support is usually good enough for break/fix issues but falls short when it comes to requesting functionality customers believe is missing.
Keep in mind that these people are speaking pre-help line. We don’t yet know how well that will work out. However, Brodkin’s write up is full of examples of frustrated Google users trying to get the help they needed when they needed it. The stories suggest that implementing a round-the-clock phone line is just the beginning of what Google needs to do to truly support its users.
Our view is that Google should provide the type of customer support available to Adwords’ customers to users of other Google services.
Cynthia Murrell, December 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Cloud Competition Gets Ugly Between Google and Microsoft
November 30, 2011
I recently read two articles discussing the competition that’s heating up between Google’s cloud services app and Microsoft.
According to a Wired Enterprise story “Google Vs. Microsoft: Not All Clouds are Created Equal” Google’s cloud technology has caused companies like Oracle and Microsoft, that have historically been on-premise companies to begin to change their ways. This is due to the fact that some of their chief officers have left to join Google and the company spent two days pitching its ever-growing collection of enterprise services to 350 businesses that were interested in adopting their business model.
In addition to this, the article states:
“Google is now offering round-the-clock phone support for all issues involving the core services in its Google Apps suite, and then David Girouard — the man who essentially founded Google’s enterprise operation — unveiled some new tools for managing smartphones that use Google Apps. But these additions served Google’s larger message: that its web-based services are more flexible and reliable than traditional “on-premise” software — or even the cloud services now offered by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.”??
While this article makes Google’s cloud technology look like it’s on the cutting edge, Microsoft is trying its darndest to compete with the search giant. ??
According to “Microsoft Take a Fight to Google Over Cloud App Defections” Microsoft has come out with a team called “Google Compete” to try and convince people to stay with office and not deflect to Google cloud apps.??
Tony Tai, a senior program manager at Microsoft said:??
“In the case of Google, we find it quite common that their consumer-oriented approach falls short of meeting enterprise customers’ needs, thus providing an opportunity for us to win the customer. The wise words of Benjamin Franklin often apply: ‘The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”??
Ouch! when did things get so ugly? and where has the civility gone?
Jasmine Ashton, November 30, 2011
Mindbreeze Demystifies Enterprise
November 16, 2011
SharePoint is supposed to be a broad-based solution to solve the enterprise needs of most users. However, there seems to be quite a bit of buzz regarding additional trainings, conferences, and webinars geared toward equipping installers and users on the ins-and-outs of the program. One such list of recommendations can be found here, at “Staffing is key to a successful SharePoint Server 2010 deployment.”
The author, Brien Posey, acknowledges that SharePoint 2010 deployment is happening at a rapid rate, but many are finding the process to be lengthier and more complicated than expected. Here is some of his advice:
“The key to assessing SharePoint staffing needs rests with determining the kind of expertise required for deployment and its long-term administration, and then mapping those requirements to staff roles. Some of those roles can likely be filled by existing members of the IT staff, but organizations might have to make additional hires.”
Posey goes on to provide a lengthy list of staff positions for consideration, architects and administrators galore. Couple this recommendation with the recent boom in SharePoint training opportunities and one has to wonder if SharePoint is not as effortless as advertised. It seems implementation and usage are both fairly complicated.
We like what we are hearing about Fabasoft Mindbreeze and its suite of solutions. Implementation is reportedly intuitive and seamless. However, if problems do arise, solutions can quickly be found via brief tutorials or online training opportunities. Don’t be trapped by SharePoint. Consult the Mindbreeze suite of solutions and see if they might be the right choice for your organization.
*Disclaimer – Mindbreeze is currently upgrading their website. Links will be checked and if problems arise they will be updated. Thanks for your patience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 16, 2011
Protected: SharePoint 2010 Assemblies
November 4, 2011
Protected: Useful Claims-Based Authentication White Paper
October 28, 2011
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