This second issue of Customer Experience Exchange highlights the contact center. Often an overlooked facet of customer relationship management (CRM), the contact center is usually the first way a customer reaches out to a company and thus should always be considered in CRM strategies. 

SAP Insider Article covering new SAP CRM innovations which help companies empower their employees, substantially improve the customer experience, and thereby achieve a competitive advantage. 

This report from Deloitte argues businesses are again investing in IT to provide the differentiation and innovation critical from their competitors despite the downturn. 

In this paper, explore a compilation of articles addressing supply chain management, social media in a business environment, and how to leverage the cloud to boost sales and drive customer satisfaction. 

This article explores ways in which small and mid-sized businesses can improve the performance of their databases - and their businesses - by upgrading to SQL Server 2008. 

Business intelligence is a hot topic in 2010, especially with the upcoming release of Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 R2 being dubbed as the "BI release." In this e-zine, one SQL Server expert breaks down exactly what goes into self-service BI, where it works and where it falls short. 

During Q2, 2010 The Birchman Group carried out a survey focused on SAP support and managed services. 

The inaugural issue of BI Trends & Strategies offers sound advice to help you in ensuring your organization is on track to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of BI and analytics. In this issue, readers will learn about a big data definition and the impact it will have on BI and data warehousing, agile development methodology and more. 

Check out this article to learn how SAP is embracing Web 2.0 opportunities for customer relationship management (CRM), from leveraging social computing to building new Web 2.0-based CRM applications. 

Declining hardware and software costs have an impact on total cost of ownership (TCO), but how desktop PCs are managed remains the most critical factor in reducing TCO.   This Gartner article illustrates how a higher management level for desktops can achieve lower TCO and improved user productivity. 

Content provided by Google. This article from the Harvard Business Review covers they key points that CEOs and executives need to know about cloud computing. Find out why cloud is a game-changer, and what is preventing companies from adopting it now. Review the courses of action you can take, and the implications of each strategy. 

In this expert e-guide, find out how to optimize SQL Server with the right choices for hardware, storage devices, and virtualization. Inside, find articles on: what not to do when purchasing hardware; if solid-state storage devices are worth the cost; hardware and risk considerations for an inevitable virtualization initiative. 

This article shows how an application grid built on Oracle Fusion Middleware can not only prevent unplanned outages, but it can improve the overall performance of mission critical business applications.