Thursday, April 10, 2008 10:36 AM/EST
The rumors are true. I have it from two reliable sources that Salesforce.com is indeed announcing on Monday, April 14, an integration with Google Apps at a news conference in San Francisco. What I am not sure about at this point is whether the integration is at the applications level with, say, a tab in Saleforce.com's CRM applications so users can access Google Apps directly, or at the platform level so developers can natively build Google Apps functionality into applications developed on Salesforce's Force.com development platform. Or both.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 1:11 PM/EST
Well into the first quarter of its Business Objects acquisition, SAP has worked to clarify its Corporate Performance Management strategy and road map, an exercise that really boils down to rationalizing a bulging portfolio of products from a mix of companies -- and tucking the whole thing under a new Performance Optimization Division umbrella (a sendoff on SAP's business user group that was combined with Business Objects). Essentially the new division is coming to market with a combination of SAP apps -- including those from its Pilot Software and OutlookSoft acquisitions -- and Business Object's portfolio that includes apps acquired from Cartesis and ALG Software. The way the whole Performance Optimization stack pans out is this: Underlying a set of GRC (governance, risk and compliance) and CPM (corporate performance management) applications is SAP's Business Intelligence Platform. The platform consists of Business Objects' Information Discovery & Delivery, Data Layer, and Enterprise...
Tuesday, January 29, 2008 3:10 PM/EST
Quite some time ago I had a conversation with AMR analyst Rob Bois and he mentioned a statistic - maybe well known but shocking to me at the time - that four out of five CRM implementations fail. In the meantime there's been the rise of Software-as-a-Service, CRM as a development platform and, always, Salesforce.com. Or the success of Salesforce.com that precedes any real discussion about the company. Now, a new report from Forrester research analyst William Band, released Jan. 10, seems to show that not much has changed on the CRM front: A lot more implementations are rated poorly than are rated succesful.
Friday, January 25, 2008 3:37 PM/EST
Earlier this month SAP released its preliminary fourth quarter 2007 earnings on the heels of its Jan. 30 full report. On the very bottom of the press release, in a footnote, the company actually intimated some pretty substantive information: SAP has discontinued its TomorrowNow operations. But the real question remains: Even if there is a buyer for TomorrowNow - whether that be a competitor or another investor - what is the damage to the very nascent (but very necessary) third party support industry?
Wednesday, January 09, 2008 3:01 PM/EST
NRF will have a separate pavillion set up on the show floor that might not generate as much attention as the Design Center, but probably should. The Association for Retail Technology Standards--the standards division of NRF--will, in conjunction with software vendors, showcase how ARTS standards work.
Monday, January 07, 2008 1:24 PM/EST
By now it's no big breaking news that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launched the first alpha of his new Wikia search engine today - the things been anticipated for at least a year - but for enterprise applications enthusiasts there is an interesting section of the site...particularly if it sees any of the success of Wikipedia.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007 2:10 PM/EST
Rumors are flying about what all this means for Oracle and its Fusion plans, for SAP and its middleware plans, and the eventual state of the enterprise applications market, which is clearly morphing into a megaplatform-and-integrated-apps market with four dominant players: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP. And the market could easily winnow down to three.
Monday, September 17, 2007 8:49 PM/EST
Business Objects is looking for a buyer. The business intelligence software developer appointed Goldman Sachs to find an investor, according to a weekend report in France's Le Figargo newspaper. Le Figaro, who did not name its sources, said there were five interested parties including SAP. The other interested parties were not mentioned, though Oracle and IBM have long been linked as potential suitors of Business Objects. In March Oracle paid $3.3 billion for Hyperion, which develops business intelligence software targeted primarily at the "office of the CFO" with corporate performance management software. Business Objects is valued at about 4.03 billion at current market prices. An acquisition by a larger company could accelerate the company's growth and further consolidate the BI market....
Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:57 PM/EST
Despite agreeing to hold my story until the morning of Marc Benioff's keynote address at Dreamforce 2006 in exchange for some pertinent details, I managed to scoop the Apex programming language news heading into Salesforce.com's big user conference last year. I figured this year, as Dreamforce loomed near, that I'd like to do the same - particularly since Benioff is known to use the Dreamforce pulpit to make big technology announcements (remember AppExchange the year before?) I gotta hand it to Salesforce. They must've called every single industry analyst that covers them, every single partner that works with them, every customer that has ever spoken to the press (and likely those that haven't) and warned them, on pain of death, not to talk to reporters. While there were certainly people willing to talk to me - about AppStore, AppExchange and Apex - every person I spoke with cited a Non...
Thursday, August 30, 2007 2:10 PM/EST
To be honest RightNow's second annual Customer Experience Impact Report seems a whole lot more exciting than the CRM upgrade news. Which leads to the question: is there anything left to report on CRM? Are there any advancements, any areas left to be developed outside of the traditional triad of sales, service and marketing? I know, I know, there are other things to consider like analytics and collaboratioin, but is there functionality left waiting in the wings? I'm really not sure.
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