Archive

Oracle has raised the ante again in the hosted applications space, announcing Wednesday that it will preview the latest version of Siebel CRM On Demand, the fourteenth version of its Software as a Service CRM solution. Siebel CRM On Demand 14 is designed to "simplify user tasks, reduce clicks and pa...

Last week, I got into the idea of evolution as it relates to the technology market and used Microsoft and Salesforce.com to illustrate the need to keep multiple plans percolating so that a company can take advantage of a move in the market. Evolution is an important filter through which I view the w...

Software as a Service solutions have been around for years. However, until recently organizations only reluctantly engaged them, choosing instead expensive and complex custom software builds implemented solely within their enterprise systems. Surely, SaaS developers have changed. However, their pros...

Adobe and Salesforce.com on Monday announced the release of the Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex, a free set of programming tools that combine Adobe's Flex technology for rich Internet application development with the Salesforce.com Apex platform for building on-demand, hosted applications. The tools all...

My company sells employee time-tracking software that automates client billing, project accounting and payroll. We have implemented these systems for customers repeatedly where the employees previously were unaccustomed to accounting for their time. Occasionally, this has generated some intense emot...

Oracle will be releasing a Critical Patch Update next Tuesday that will remedy 37 vulnerabilities across several product lines, including 13 in the Oracle Database and five in the Application Server. Some of the vulnerabilities are part of Oracle's family of acquired products. For instance, this upd...

Mortgage lenders have improved their online customers' experience over the last year, but many Web sites still fall far short of meeting their visitors' needs, according to a report released Tuesday by a financial services customer satisfaction research firm. In a Web site study of 26 major online m...

Salesforce.com has announced its first move in what is likely to be a larger push into the content management space: the acquisition last month of Koral Technologies. Salesforce.com is leveraging the small company's technology and content management platform as the building block for Apex Content, i...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced its latest acquisition to the world. CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year. However, it ...

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contract awarded in November 2005 charged Accenture Health & Life Sciences and three other tech developers with the creation of a fully integrated health information system to connect healthcare communities. They had to respect the provisions of the...

An application currently in beta on Salesforce.com's AppExchange is designed especially for politicians in campaign mode. To be called (what else?) "CampaignForce.com," the product will be available in a few weeks, according to Dan Burton, senior vice president of global public policy at Salesforce....

TimeLinx Software has announced TimeLinx CRM 5.0, which combines time, task and expense tracking for client projects, with sales and marketing data captured by traditional CRM systems. The product's features include a Web-based and network time sheet client, Microsoft Project synchronization and a r...

Aiming squarely at the SOA/BPM market niche, Germany's Software AG has announced it is buying WebMethods for approximately $546 million, or $9.15 per share. The announcement was hardly unexpected, as it was clear that WebMethods needed to do something to address its scale issue, as well as other com...

Intervoice has just introduced new self-service voice products based on SCXML -- a dialogue language that can be used in multiple contexts and, most intriguingly for vendors and end users, multiple modes. In Intervoice's case, it has incorporated a runtime-service-orchestration engine based on SCXML...

SAP's abrupt announcement that golden boy Shai Agassi was leaving the company last week hit like a proverbial ton of bricks. The initial announcement said all the right things about Agassi wanting to pursue other options, and board chairman Hasso Plattner made the usual remarks about still being fr...