Vendors

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points a...

In the continuing discussion of cloud computing, Salesforce.com occupies a unique place. While most cloud vendors have kept to one component of cloud computing, Salesforce has inserted itself into all areas, and the company is using its flagship CRM applications as its first case example. Most peop...

Oracle is giving users of JD Edwards -- one of the myriad enterprise software suites the company has acquired over the last decade -- a new set of tools to leverage through its value chain planning applications. It's upgrading the JD Edwards offering with a bundle of SCM-related applications and bes...

There are always niche vendors developing new applications around functionality that doesn't quite fit into a defined software category. When the analyst community takes note -- and then decides to give the category a name -- a bona fide trend is established. That is happening to SpringCM -- a Softw...

I am hearing from vendors that their on-premise CRM sales in the early part of this year are pretty good. No one has briefed me ahead of their earnings calls, but the results from late last year and Q1 seem to be pretty good. I should probably wait until the numbers for the last quarter come out fr...

Not surprisingly, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries -- and, to a lesser extent, biotech -- are waiting with great interest to see how the health insurance and care plan making its way through Congress will look in its final form. What many probably have not realized is that the companies ...

For the upcoming study, "The 2009 SFA Report: Best-in-Class Strategies for Increasing Returns on SFA Investments," Aberdeen surveyed over 195 companies that are automating sales activity. In the research, Salesforce.com featured prominently as a solution provider of choice. In fact, 74 percent of th...

This is the marketing resource management world, according to Manticore CEO Jeff Erramouspe: There are the enterprise-oriented types of platforms that can handle robust applications. Their downside is that they require consultants to manage their difficult implementations and dedicated personnel for...

My ride from San Francisco Airport to Redwood Shores, Calif., tells the story of my entire trip to the West Coast last week. Southbound on Route 101, traffic was lighter than I was accustomed to in my more than 10 years of visiting the area. Northbound, there was a five-mile backup, which caused m...

M.A. Ketabchi, president, CEO and founder of business process management provider Savvion, might have done just as well focusing on product marketing in his career. From the beginning, he has distinguished Savvion from the competition by concentrating on the one thing potential customers care abou...

It is has been a roller-coaster year for E2open CEO Mark Woodward, mainly because that is how long he has been at the helm of the Software as a Service provider of supply-and-demand chain, procurement, and B2B integration applications. Over the past twelve months at E2open, the erstwhile senior advi...

The universe of enterprise resource planning providers is huge; ditto for open source. The space where twain meet? Not so much. xTuple is an open source ERP provider, and CEO Ned Lilly says there are few fellow travelers on his company's path. In this tanking economy, the company has been leveraging...

Cloud computing is remaking just about every software category -- and project management is no exception. In the on-premise software era, collaboration was limited by the technology of a particular firm, as well as the security requirements of a particular industry. That was then, of course. Now, cl...

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in. Enter Marketo, a startup whose raison d'etre is to get people to buy. Surprisingly -- or not, given its product lineup -- Marketo is d...

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...