Vendors

Oracle faced off with SAP in an Oakland, Calif., court on Monday in a hearing to determine the amount of damages the former is owed over its claim that SAP stole its software. Oracle reportedly wants $2.3 billion dollars, while SAP is seeking to pare down the sum to within the range of tens of milli...

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and num...

RightNow Technologies certainly has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the company used its industry influencers day in Colorado Springs this week to remind us. I saw the day as a marker of a turning point in the company's development, a time when it said to the world, "The first phase of lif...

NetSuite is planting a stake in the Asia Pacific market, with the launch of its first partner conference in the region this week. The conference, SuiteCloud APAC 2010, involves more than 60 channel partners, independent software vendors and developers. It is a roving show for NetSuite, with stops in...

SugarCRM has rolled out OEM Platform Edition, a new product for its software vendor and distribution channel. The release doesn't further SugarCRM's open source-based functionality. Rather, the company is repackaging the latest version of Sugar 6, which came out this summer, in a format and with to...

A lot went down at Oracle OpenWorld. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all, and you can easily find it online if you wish. I was impressed with several things that Oracle did, including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of comput...

Cloud computing and Fusion Apps were the major points of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 on Wednesday. Ellison also took several swipes at Salesforce.com and its CEO, Marc Benioff. His speech concluded with an extensive demonstration of Fusion Apps, assisted by sev...

Oracle will issue the first release of its next-generation Fusion applications in the first quarter of 2011, company CEO Larry Ellison has announced. It took the database giant five years to integrate the "best features" of PeopleSoft, Siebel and its own E-business suite. Oracle purchased PeopleSoft...

Sybase has only recently formally entered the SAP corporate family. However, the two companies have collaborated on software integration projects for years: hence, the introduction of Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM, a native iPhone app. When designing the app, Sybase took the iPhone user needs into...

Microsoft is set to release both the online and in-house versions of its new CRM package this fall. Along with the beta release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the company will be opening an app store for third-party developers called "Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace." That's according to a company a...

They say we have big brains because we have all needed to work better together over the past 150,000 years. The more people work together, the more tools they need to make collaboration a productive art, rather than a befuddled mess. Rather than wait for human evolution to keep up the pace, Salesfor...

Salesforce.com has filed a countersuit against Microsoft, alleging that the software giant infringed on five of its patents in such products as Windows Server, the .Net platform and Microsoft's Windows Live authentication system. Salesforce.com is seeking unspecified damages in the suit, which was f...

All is not well in venture capital land; at least, it's been a lot better. In April, the National Venture Capital Association, which works with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop industry data, reported its numbers for both fund-raising and investment, and it represents a world turned upside down. ...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage ...

A typical physician's office features several common elements: a reception area, a stack of outdated magazines, and shelves of slim file folders holding hundreds of paper medical records. The U.S. government is hoping to change one of those elements with a major initiative designed to convert all pa...