Stories about: Delano Technology

As the CTO of divine, Robert "Buck" Flannigan is out to change the way people think about CM (content management) and the way that applications interact with one another across organizational boundaries. In recent months, divine has merged with or acquired the assets of 19 different companies, including Open Market Inc., Delano Technology Corp., Eprise Corp., eshare communications, Intira, SageMaker Inc. and Viant Corp., as part of a plan to become a service provider for extended enterprise applications. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Flannigan talks about how software-as-a-service application models based on Web services will enable of a new class of enterprise applications for business.

Divine this week added yet another purchase to its growing suite of software and services, picking up CRM vendor Delano Technology in a stock merger valued at approximately US$33 million.

Despite the brief moment of lifting hopes on the news of rising stock indexes Thursday, all was back to gloom and doom by the time the markets closed, with the same rumbles of layoffs and financial warnings that shook the technology industry in the first quarter of the year.

As dot-com ventures continue to flood the marketplace, the fight for customers has reached a fever pitch. Driving customers to your e-commerce site has become a complicated and costly proposal, so maintaining an effective relationship to keep them once they arrive is now more important than ever.

LOOKING TO CAPITALIZE on the fast-growing infrastructure requirements of e-business ventures, industry stalwarts this week at Internet World in Los Angeles will tout all-in-one services.

For business-to-business and business-to-consumer Web sites, online customers are becoming not only more plentiful, but also more demanding. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. With the competition only a click away, the pressure is on every e-business to distinguish itself with better customer service. You can't take days to respond to e-mail inquiries and expect customers to keep coming back. At the same time, the Internet can help companies reduce service and support costs, because it provides ways to help customers help themselves and enables customer service representatives to serve more customers in less time than they ever could over the phone.

When you think of building a World Wide Web application, chances are you don't think about building it around e-mail.