Archive

Silicon Valley venture capitalists Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have pooled resources with Salesforce.com to roll out a fund that will invest in companies' development activities on Salesforce.com's platform. Typical investments will equal about $500,000 each, totaling $25 million over...

The big news when Saleforce.com released its latest version of what is hot in the CRM space -- Winter '08 -- was Force.com. The immediately understood subtext was that Salesforce.com had officially begun its migration to a platform on-demand company, launching the first salvo in what Denis Pombriant...

Just a couple of weeks ago, two terms, on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS), were used interchangeably -- it was truly a difference without a distinction -- but a lot has changed in a short time. First, Salesforce.com introduced Force.com, and a day later SAP announced a long awaited on-demand...

IBM made several developments in its RFID partner and product platform that should make software and hardware integration of the technology easier for firms, the company said. For starters, standards organization GS1 EPCglobal has certified the IBM WebSphere RFID Information Center as fully complian...

RFID has been a highly touted technology in recent years, but concerns about high costs and actual benefits have hindered its adoption. That's gradually changing as developers and vendors focus on systems design, development and interoperability of specific applications in the public and private sec...

Today's sales manager is faced with a myriad of challenges in an increasing hostile selling environment -- deals stuck in the pipeline, frequently missed sales "commits," sales people not hitting quota, and high sales employee turnover are just a few of the issues that the beleaguered sales managers...

The Oracle v. SAP intellectual property infringement lawsuit moved a step forward Tuesday, as Judge Martin Jenkins of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California assigned a trial date and made other procedural decisions in the first case management conference between the two parti...

Thieves were able to breach the corporate databases of TJX Companies and steal millions of credit card numbers because the company retained too much information that was not properly secured, according to a report released Tuesday by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. TJX is the paren...

During Dreamforce there was a panel discussion for media and the financial and industry analysts. Some of Salesforce.com's senior executives were there for a panel discussion, which included Chief Financial Officer Steve Cakebread, cofounder and Executive Vice President Parker Harris and Vice Presi...

Customers who shop online at Walmart.com may soon have no way to speak with a live person over the phone to ask questions. Thanks to a new "Customer Contact Reduction" program, the retailer by next week will remove its toll-free customer service support number, according to a Tuesday report in the N...

Gartner provided welcome news to the CRM industry earlier this month when it released estimates that overall CRM revenue would rise by about $1 billion annually through 2011; for this year, CRM software revenues were projected to exceed $7.4 billion -- a 14 percent increase from 2006. Not surprising...

With an eye toward minimizing its carbon footprint, Wal-Mart Stores will partner with the Carbon Disclosure Project to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain. An initial pilot project will focus on seven commonly used product categories -- DVDs, toothpaste, ...

SAS added a new application to its lineup of customer service analytical offerings. SAS Real Time Decision Manager embeds analytically driven decision logic at every customer interaction. The Decision Manager tool was introduced during Gartner's CRM conference this week, along with an updated versio...

The familiar adage that the consumer is always right has taken on a new meaning in the Internet age. Rather than talk with a store manager, consumers are now making their feelings about different products known on message boards and blogs. "Many companies tried to ignore the online forums, but most ...

SAP, which has developed and acquired a number of applications for small and medium-sized companies, added yet another to its line up. SAP Business ByDesign is an on-demand enterprise suite aimed at companies with 100 to 500 employees that do not have strong internal IT support. The application prov...