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Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff devoted much of his keynote speech at Dreamforce on Wednesday on lashing out at Microsoft. "There are forces out there that want to stop us," Benioff told his audience at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco. "We're trying to transform our industry, and when you ...

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku, a cloud application platform. It will pay about $212 million in cash, net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of January 2011 if everything goes well. Salesforce.co...

Well, it's Wednesday at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce in San Francisco, and the excitement is palpable. A huge crowd stood in line waiting for the doors to the keynote conference room to open, which they did at about 8:15 a.m. They were supposed to open at 8. Once again, Salesforce.com chairman and CE...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vi...

Salesforce.com has added 50 new features to Force.com, which it will roll out on Wednesday, company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said. He disclosed the information during his keynote speech opening the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center Tuesday. Benioff also described what...

Salesforce.com at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco today debuted a database in the cloud service, Database.com, that combines attractive heterogeneous features for a virtual data tier for developers of all commercial, technical and open source persuasions. Salesforce.com is upping the ante...

It's about 8:20 a.m. on Tuesday in San Francisco, and Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" is playing as people file into a conference room at the Moscone Center for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's speech here at Dreamforce 2010. Well, yes -- the doors to the room where keynotes will be given opened al...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled Database.com, which it called the first enterprise database for the cloud. This is "the exact same database technology" as Salesforce.com's existing database but is "being packaged and provided as a standalone product so people can build platforms on their own tech...

NetSuite CRM+ is a customer relationship management tool that provides users with more than just standard customer service functionality. NetSuite's system gives users the capability to run their entire business by providing a single view of the customer. "NetSuite provides a complete business manag...

Among the many announcements that will no doubt be emanating from Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference next week will be this: TreeHouse Interactive, a SaaS partner relationship management provider, will join AppExchange. When it does, it will provide the first independent PRM offering on the site...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" "The Holidays: Will You Survive? Will Your Family Survive?" OK, I stole that last one...

Social media have practical applications throughout the buyer cycle for corporate and retail customers. The first step in this direction is to get familiar with social media and then connect the channel with CRM processes. There may be challenges in seamlessly integrating the social media channel wi...

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try so...