Search Results

You have to feel for Yahoo -- well, sort of. It just got an unsolicited offer to buy the company for 60 percent more than stockholders thought the company was worth at the time. The board evidently would like something closer to 90 percent, and it certainly is nice to have dreams. The problem is that Yahoo had no bargaining position, as it knew that if Microsoft backed out of the deal, Yahoo's stock was likely to fall by half. If that happened, the stockholders would likely go after the board and executive staff with pitchforks...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a US$54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compensate her fully for her loss...

"It is very disappointing that the Senate passed this bill," said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a party in the suits. "We will have to see what happens in the House." However, it is not necessarily a given that the plain...

"The way it was revealed leads to suspicions about what exactly was being done," Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told the E-Commerce Times A move by some cable companies to begin testing metered access options for broadband users -- plans that ch...

"E-mail continues to be one of the highest growth parts of data storage," he pointed out. "When you look at the volume of storage required to store and make e-mails available, farming that out to a trusted third-party customer makes sense for a lot more companies. Otherwise, they're stuck with having to add storage hardware and increase the size of their IT staff to support those assets."

Google's three likely moves are to use anti-trust complaints with the Department of Justice in the U.S. and with the European Commission, cherry-picking the best of Yahoo's technical and operational staff during the intermediate time when folks will be most concerned about their jobs, and if those aren't working, bidding against Microsoft so the purchase is excessively expensive...

The survey also revealed the No. 1 pressure driving companies to implement a distributed agent strategy is the need to increase efficiency while reducing costs. Aberdeen defines a distributed agent strategy as one that meets the staffing requirements of a single contact center by blending some combination of locations, home-based agents and offshoring...

The funds will be invested in SugarCRM's growing global network, as well as in bolstering its engineering staff "We are going to continue to hire more engineers as we build out our platform," Chris Harrick, senior director of product marketing for SugarCRM, told CRM Buyer....

The blog is written by one-name employees, including "Bob," "Ethel" and "Chance." Looks to me like the posts are written by a) the PR staff and given random author names; or b) the actual Bob, Ethel and Chance -- but the TSA is scared people will google their full names and harass them. Seems fishy...

Yahoo is "thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives," CEO Jerry Yang wrote in an e-mail to staff. Yang and chairman of the board Roy Bostock discussed it and "no decisions have been made about Microsoft's proposal." Yahoo has hired "top advisors" to help in the process, he said...

The truth is that call centers are expensive, and they don't usually show positive returns except for the fractional payback you get when you can boost productivity by handling more calls in an hour with a fixed number of agents. Also, with so many moving parts, it really is easy to believe that the system you've nursed along for years is as good as anything out there -- or certainly good enough. On top of all this there are the ongoing costs of constant hiring and training and re-training call center staff, which may draw attention away from the issue of infrastructure...

Is the data center staffed 24 hours a day? Is it staffed with security personnel, and if not, what are the procedures for the onsite staff to deal with security threats?...

A merger would also create "audience critical mass" that would in turn boost value for advertisers, Microsoft said, maximize the value of each company's engineering staffs and enable up to $1 billion in annual cost savings and synergies Scrutiny Expected...

What's becoming apparent is that call centers are useful up to a point in any marketing campaign, yet often lack the ability to drive sales prospects into the latter stages of the sales process. While VPs and directors are reluctant to share specifics, you get the sense that there is still a more "thin and wide" approach to managing call center staffs' level of knowledge rather than "focused and deep."

Software as a Service is increasingly popular, and for good reason. Its advantages include a greatly reduced time-to-deployment, low upfront costs (for less approval-process drag) and much less need for scarce IT staff involvement. The result is lower business risk by eliminating "bet-the-company" deployment steamrollers, unpredictable cost spikes, and upgrade or maintenance nightmares. For these and other reasons, about 25 percent of business software will be delivered under the SaaS model by 2011, according to recent predictions...

These shifting cost concerns, in turn, reflect growing user desires to provide integrated access to information, from the desktop through to business-critical "back-end" application such as ERP (enterprise resource planning). The September 2007 Aberdeen benchmark study, Two Worlds Converge: Enterprise Applications Meet the Desktop, surveyed more than 250 information workers and used key performance indicators (KPIs), focusing on revenue and staff size to identify the Best-in-Class among respondents' companies. Two of the top strategic actions among 43 percent of the Best-in-Class in terms of uniting enterprise applications with desktop tools are to:...

Big Blue is promising "simple to acquire and manage packages" of software that will not require information technology staff in-house but will enable businesses to focus on running their operations while using the same tools that larger enterprises have at their disposal for productivity and collaboration...

Running the Vista OS in virtual environments also allows network administrators to monitor and manage large swaths of individual machines in one place, said John Whaley, founder and principal engineer for Moka5, a Redwood City, Calif.-based desktop virtualization startup. That centralized system enables the IT staff to fix and update entire networks from the virtual environment...

The bulk of the investment -- $750 million -- was designated for research and development activities including training, development and staffing. The remaining funds -- $350 million -- were used to create leasing and other financial solutions for Cisco customers and partners, customer support operations and invest in India-based start-ups...

Saturn allows staff to drill down on transaction details and set message-level breakpoints for deep log analytics, allowing for continuous custom improvement. Key features include business user view into workflow and state;...