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Private equity heavyweight the Blackstone Group is taking another publicly traded software company private. It has announced it will purchase Alliance Data Systems for $7.8 billion, including the assumption of certain debt, or $81.75 per share in cash. That is a premium of 30 percent over the $62.96...

At its annual Insights business partner conference recently, Sage Software rolled out a new iteration of its SalesLogix application which, given the number of advancements the platform offers users, is deceptively numbered version 7.2. "I think the company undersold itself when it didn't call it ver...

Oracle has entered the product lifecycle management niche with a flourish through its acquisition of best-of-breed vendor Agile Software. While there are other active PLM vendors, Agile offers a difficult-to-replicate line of products and functionality that address product innovation and the introdu...

It has taken some time to assemble the ingredients, but the CRM industry is finally poised to deliver robust mobile offerings. If you think you've heard this before, that's because you have -- in 2004, in 2005 and, yes, last year as well. To be sure, there are mobile CRM apps available on the market...

Salesforce.com continues to carve its user base -- and prospective user base -- into finer and finer niches, which it then targets with new products. The rollout of the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com exemplifies that strategy. Salesforce.com introduced a contact center application w...

RightNow Technologies has introduced its third industry vertical and appears to be poised to introduce a fourth -- in Consumer Goods Products -- in the near future. Thus far, the company has focused on industry groups in which it has a strong expertise and a large number of clients, such as higher e...

Talisma has introduced a new version of CIM 8.0, its self-service suite. While this release includes numerous enhancements to the existing product lineup, it also offers something completely new for the suite: a proactive sales feature set that leverages reactive service capabilities introduced in e...

Microsoft officially staked a claim in the burgeoning business intelligence market at its first-ever conference devoted to the niche. Conference keynoter Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, ticked off the strides Redmond has taken thus far in preparation for its push into BI: It...

Kana has pushed into the professional services area with its acquisition of eVergance Partners a management consulting and systems integration firm. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to Kana for 2007 and is expected to close during the s...

Five9's Virtual Call Center products -- on-demand contact center applications -- are now fully compatible with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. Essentially, what this means is that the system, which requires only a Windows-based PC, Internet connection and headset, can now support Vista....

It is not easy to find anyone who is sympathetic to Roy Pearson Jr.'s position. Pearson has made headlines in recent days for his eye-popping $65 million suit against his dry cleaners. This is not a tort about, say, environmental negligence that caused Pearson injury or illness. No, the man is suing...

RightNow Technologies and Genesys will combine their customer service application suites to deliver a joint offering available the end of May. The end result will be prebuilt, integrated computer telephony integration functionality in the RightNow suite and, as an added bonus for the company, access...

Unica has introduced a new version of its marketing resource management platform, Affinium Plan 7.3. Though it is a point release, some of Version 7.3's new functionality is new to the industry as well. The new Marketing Objects feature allows marketers to digitally store and reuse marketing informa...

Continuing its drive to expand beyond servicing a company's front-end needs, Salesforce.com is making products developed for its AppExchange platform available to any company -- not just buyers of its flagship CRM application. Salesforce Platform Edition gives users access to the 575 or so human res...

SAP is, as CEO Henning Kagermann said, off to a good start with its 2007 Q1 earnings -- especially after its less-than-stellar final quarter in 2006. The company reported a 10 percent jump in profit based on increased sales of its software and support services. Net income for the first quarter reach...

Giving users a hint of what to expect when Fusion is rolled out, Oracle has introduced its Application Integration Architecture, an open standards-based platform for integrating software from its various product lines. The platform includes prebuilt integrations for Oracle's enterprise resource pla...

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...

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...

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....

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...