Vendors

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or...

The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and it...

InsideView will be announcing several upgrades to its SaaS social sales and intelligence application in the coming weeks. Some of the changes, including social profile features, have already gone live. The company has been turning them on over the past month, as soon as they were developed, said Ral...

Something interesting is happening at Sage, but it looks like the company isn't ready to tell its whole story. That's a challenge if you happen to be hosting a combined partner and user group meeting, which Sage did this week in Washington, D.C. The company's annual get-together had its share of a...

Last week Marc Benioff was in Boston with another regional Cloudforce tour event, and Stephen Denning has written a good book. There is a connection between them. The day after the Boston Bruins clinched the Stanley Cup, Benioff was in Boston, and thank goodness the company decided on a noon start ...

DemandResults is getting set to release version 2.0 of its SEO for Salesforce.com app. This iteration builds on the premise of the first app, founder and CEO Howard Brown said, which was essentially a basic insertion of Google Analytics into the Salesforce.com platform. In this upcoming version, set...

Most of the people I talk to think of a business model as the way a company makes money. We certainly agree on that. One's business model can encompass numerous things, like product mix, marketing and sales plan, how you sell -- direct, channel, retail -- and lots more. One thing that usually mis...

SAP is holding Sapphire, its annual user meeting in Orlando, this week. Sapphire is one of the premiere events on the IT tradeshow calendar, along with Microsoft Convergence, Oracle Open World, Sage Insights and Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. These events each draw tens of thousands of people from a...

Yesterday Zuora, the billing and payment solution company for subscription businesses, did a smart thing, at least I think so. At NetSuite's user meeting, SuiteWorld, Zuora chief Tien Tzuo announced that his trademark product is now pre-integrated with NetSuite's financials. But that wasn't what's...

To meet the growing demand for social CRM, RightNow positions itself as a provider of "customer experience management" solutions, a term the company prefers to use, said John Kembel, vice president of social solutions. "That's a bit more customer-focused." RightNow CX, the customer experience suite,...

The shift from traditional CRM to social media is creating a new paradigm for customer interaction, and Salesforce.com offers cloud-based solutions to help companies meet this new challenge, Scott Holden, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, told CRM Buyer. One of the biggest ch...

With its social software platform Mzinga OmniSocial, Mzinga's goal is to deliver a role-based application with CRM capability that a company can then repurpose to collect information from its customers. Rather than concentrating on traditional CRM, Mzinga focuses on the enterprise network side to he...

eGain recently introduced a multidimensional search function to its knowledge agent and its self-service product lines. In essence, it is two sides of the same coin in that it provides the same functionality to both the agent desktop and the computer screen that a customer uses when searching for a...

Computer software requires an enormous amount of support. That fact has enriched companies such as Oracle and SAP, which levy annual support fees of about 20 percent of the sale prices of their applications. That's one of the things that just sticks in the craw of Clint Oram, chief technology office...

CDC Software has upgraded its sales module, Pivotal Sales Force Automation, with enhancements that the company developed by borrowing from the best practices it observed in its clients, said Ehab Samy, director of product management for CRM applications. In addition, it rolled out these upgrades th...