E-Commerce Blog

The health insurance industry, especially in the U.S., has a long way to go before it achieves a high level of performance in the use of customer relationship management tools. However, pressure is coming from market forces — including new government healthcare reform policies — that will compel improvements in health insurance CRM, whether insurance companies want it or not. A new wrinkle in health insurance that is just now emerging as a major factor — and one that will be more important in the future — is Consumer Directed Healthcare.

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Health Insurance CRM, Part 1: Shifting Into Catch-Up Mode

Gartner has released a list of the top 10 technologies that will dominate the landscape for the next three years. The release comes at a jittery time for technology stocks and early stage startups alike, with all the major market indexes on a downward spiral. The list also comes just one day after the research firm cut its 2009 outlook on growth in IT spending from 5.8 percent to 2.3 percent. Despite the turmoil, Gartner’s list suggests that innovation in the technology sector never really stops.

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Virtualization, Cloud Computing Top Gartner’s Tech Trends List

Gartner has slashed its outlook for growth in spending on information technology in 2009 from 5.8 percent to 2.3 percent. Forecasts could decline further if the economy continues to weaken, the firm warned. Total global IT spending could rise just 2.3 percent to $3.5 trillion as many businesses cut their budgets for enterprise software, servers and communications infrastructure. The news comes at a bad time for technology stocks, which have been battered across the board by the turmoil on Wall Street that began several weeks ago.

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Gartner: IT Spending Set to Sputter

Two research firms, Gartner and IDC, have released reports indicating Apple has generated a stellar uptick in shipments of Macs to customers in the United States — so much so that the Cupertino, Calif., company has eclipsed, or perhaps surpassed, Acer to become the third biggest personal computer manufacturer selling in the U.S. market. While IDC puts Apple virtually neck-and-neck with Acer with 7.8 percent of the U.S. market, both IDC and Gartner report astounding Apple growth in the second quarter of 2008 compared to the second quarter of 2007.

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Apple, Acer Battle for Third Spot in US PC Market

Sales of customer relationship management software rose dramatically in 2007, driven in part by the take-up of Software as a Service offerings, according to analyst group Gartner. Sales of CRM software totaled about $8.1 billion in 2007, Gartner said in a new report. That represents a 23 percent increase from sales in 2006. Emerging markets accounted for 15 percent of CRM sales in 2007, while 53 percent of sales were concentrated in the U.S. and 32 percent in Western Europe.

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SaaS, Emerging Markets Drive CRM Sales