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For some companies, the decision to move to the cloud is a no-brainer -- especially if they limit their planning to pure number crunching. Without a doubt, the savings for such a leap, both explicit and implicit, can be huge. Still, though, there are technical issues to consider, not the least of wh...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...

As with any new technology, there are special considerations that must be taken into account when deciding how or whether to implement a cloud-based application. These are early days for cloud computing, which means the planning process must move off auto-pilot. Here are some of the things companies...

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

Oracle has acquired Relsys, a small private company that makes drug safety analytics software for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The terms of the deal were not revealed. Relsys will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which is expected to take place by this summer. O...

Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, a new social media application. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a free platform that lets people send out messages of no more than 140 characters to as broad a community as they can build. The posts, or "tweets," as they're known, can cover ...

Having joined the business software company in 1996, George Klaus, chairman, president and CEO of Epicor, is hardly a newbie by industry standards. However, he tells CRM Buyer that all of his executive team has been with the company even longer -- long enough, in other words, to have weathered sever...

Although Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu doesn't describe his company as the Wal-Mart of the software world, he would likely find the comparison apt. Some vendors stand out from their peers because they were the first to commercialize a particular application; some because they were the most successful in ev...

It's been four months since Google announced it would guarantee 99.9 percent system accessibility for users of its Google Apps Premier Edition -- a cloud-based productivity suite of business-oriented messaging and collaboration apps, including integration capabilities and support. At the time, it se...

Journyx, a company that provides Web-based time-tracking and project management applications, also offers its customers a back door into customer service. That is, its application lets users track what a customer cost. That is a number that is often surprisingly miscalculated or not calculated at a...

By any measure, SaaS vendor RightNow Technologies closed the year on a high note, completing seven million-dollar-plus deals in the last quarter. In fact, CEO Greg Gianforte told CRM Buyer, "our sales teams delivered the highest total bookings in any quarter over the last two years. In the current e...

Open development platforms and their offspring -- mashups -- are behind the significant changes in CRM functionality that have been introduced over the last year or so. These are early days for Platform as a Service, though, and each vendor is approaching the technology on its own preferred path. Fo...

Earlier this month Zuora, a startup that's less than a year old, launched Z-Commerce, a platform that gives developers access to its applications as well as Z-Force's API documentation, sample code and toolkits. There is also a sandbox environment, currently available in private beta. A few years ag...

When Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly, says his Software as a Service sales performance management company began 2009 with a big bang, he didn't -- as one might assume in this economy -- mean it in a bad way. In January, the company acquired Centive, its primary competitor. In Februa...

Software as a Service has become the business and software delivery model of choice among new vendors -- not to mention companies seeking to invest in IT. Surprisingly, considering the model's growing market share, few companies have sprung up to offer SaaS applications for the providers themselves....

Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down. Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Deman...

It should come as no surprise that Maurice Ramirez -- an emergency room attending physician with Florida Hospital's Flagler division -- is in favor of widespread adoption of automated personal health records, or PHRs. Ramirez was once chief medical officer for a company that was developing such an a...

Genesys has always been a distinct entity within the Alcatel-Lucent line of divisions, products and services. On Jan. 1, though, it was folded into a larger group called the "Applications Software Group." Genesys' mission of offering contact center products and services geared toward enterprises and...

For the last few years, Amdocs has been introducing modules, or "packs," to customers. These are packaged applications that are equipped with features that address a specific task or functional area and are designed for fast implementation. This strategy was on display last week when Amdocs rolled o...

Among the new tools and features SugarCRM introduced at its global developer conference this week are a new Web services framework and mobile customizations. The open source customer relationship management company also reiterated its support for the cloud, with the rollout of several additional c...