Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've observed technology long, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era.

In the last few decades, statisticians and computer scientists have produced a dazzling arsenal of extremely powerful tools to help managers translate data into business decisions.

An IDC MarketScape report from IDC Retail Insights finds that product lifecycle management has evolved to become a central lynchpin for retailers to conduct customer-centric, efficient and effective brand management. The new study, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) Applications 2012 Vendor Assessment, examines the impact of retail PLM and its ability to improve return on capital and brand equity, while reducing risk. Vendors evaluated in this report include: Centric Software, Core Solutions, Dassault Systemes, Gerber, Lectra, NGC, PTC, SAP, Siemens and TradeStone Software.

A functioning demand-planning process is a key enabler for supply chain organizations, and getting the process right is fundamental to improving demand-planning effectiveness, according to Gartner analysts.

Cloud computing is slowly becoming a mainstream technology. However, even before the hype cycle has died down, cloud providers are already starting to see downward price pressures. Every hosting provider under the sun is now repackaging itself as a cloud provider, and basic capacity and services are quickly becoming commodities.

In today's business milieu, the likelihood of successfully selecting and implementing corporate software, particularly large and complex solutions such as enterprise resource planning, is very difficult to foretell owing in large part to the nature of those projects.

Big data is real and it is costing you money. This is according to a recent report put out by Oracle breaking down some of the most pressing big data business challenges facing manufacturers today.

Following tests that showed mobile POS successfully sped up the checkout process in its Rack stores, Nordstrom will roll out approximately 1,500 of the devices to its 110 Rack units by the end of Q3. This deployment is in addition to the mobile POS technology already in use in Nordstrom's 117 full-line stores.

In today's global business environment, smart companies are learning to collaborate more efficiently, connecting and interacting with ever-expanding communities of customers, suppliers and peers. And they are, in the process, unleashing a new model for operating that is helping to improve their productivity, profits and ultimately, their advantage in an ultra-competitive marketplace. According to Collaborate to Win, a report produced by CFO Research in collaboration with Ariba, Inc., they are capitalizing on the convergence of recent technology trends, including cloud computing, mobility, social and business networks.