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Salesforce.com experienced a global outage early Tuesday, the second major outage in two weeks for the CRM company. Salesforce.com customers in the company's NA1, NA5, NA6, CS0, CS3, CS1 and CS12 regions lost access starting just before 1 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday. Access was restored gradually, ...

Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of recent articles that point in a different though not opposite direction. "Oracle Is Sta...

Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follow...

Salesforce.com announced it was buying Buddy Media for nearly $700 million on Monday. In any discussion, that's a lot of money, maybe more than Salesforce has yet spent on any acquisition. What's going on? As you might expect, I see economics playing an important role here, and I think there are ...

The way people and companies decide what to buy is changing, becoming intractably intertwined with social recommendations, noted Sanjay Dholakia, SVP of Marketo's product marketing and corporate development. "This means that consumers and buyers have ability to educate themselves instead of going to...

Salesforce.com is reportedly close to acquiring social media marketing manager Buddy Media for about $800 million. Buddy Media's main business is helping corporations manage their brand presence on Facebook. It has branched out to other social media platforms, including Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn...

This spring has seen a raft of software company events and announcements, and they've been good meetings full of real news and important new developments. It is as if these companies bided their time during the worst of the recession, building new product, thinking about the future and how customer...

I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in college, and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about springtime and renewal. This April was especially memorable in our industry, and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the things I witnessed. Mostly, for...

Small CRM players have a chance to get their names out in the market if they win top spot at the second annual CRM Idol competition, which kicked off Monday. Hopefuls have until 6 p.m. Pacific time on May 25 to file their submissions. Contestants will be assigned a mentor to help them prepare the b...

Salesforce.com has unveiled a new series of cloud computing initiatives for the government user base -- a highly lucrative niche for tech vendors, especially those that can present their products in a budget-friendly light. The new offerings, bundled under the name "Government Cloud," include a dedi...

This might be the year we look on in hindsight as the time Oracle got its groove back. It is well known that CEO Larry Ellison thinks in 10-year cycles and about how the industry seems to morph like a caterpillar about every decade. He's not the only one. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has ...

Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent ne...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing...

To get a sense of all the wonderfulness surrounding Convergence, you need only glance at some of the many observations made by the likes of Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Dennis Howlett, Josh Greenbaum and many others. So kudos to Microsoft. My observations will be somewhat different. While I also t...

Microsoft is stepping up its cloud strategy, with the announcement that it will port its Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning software to Windows Azure this year. The company outlined plans for the transition at Convergence 2012, held last week in Houston. Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics G...