Deals

Business process management vendor Pegasystems will be acquiring CRM company Chordiant for $161.5 million, or $5 per share. While the deal will clearly provide synergies to both companies, it is also a function of the general consolidation in the CRM and BPM space, Nucleus Research Vice President Re...

With last summer's launch of Avaya Aura and the purchase of Nortel Enterprise Solutions and Nortel Government Solutions in December, Avaya has placed itself squarely in the No. 1 spot for the global enterprise telephony and unified communications, audio conferencing, enterprise messaging and contact...

Avaya is redoubling its efforts to gain traction in the mid-market, a neglected but potentially very lucrative niche for contact center providers. To that end, Avaya has acquired Agile Software, the company from which it had been OEM-ing its main mid-market solution, Avaya Contact Center Express. Wi...

Oracle has acquired Relsys, a small private company that makes drug safety analytics software for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The terms of the deal were not revealed. Relsys will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which is expected to take place by this summer. O...

INSIGHTS

Oracle’s Partner Clique

Oracle continued its fast-following ways last week when it introduced additional functionality for Oracle On-Demand Release 16. The statement completed a two-part announcement begun the week before and brings to eight the number of new on-demand CRM applications from the company. The products annou...

You can't say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrat...

Oracle is acquiring Primavera Software -- a best-of-breed vendor in the project portfolio management niche. The company already has some in-house functionality in this asset category; it now plans to leverage its existing technology with the Primavera product line to produce an enterprise applicatio...

INSIGHTS

Salesforce Shows It’s Mortal After All

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a $31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively li...

Salesforce.com has acquired InStranet for $31.5 million, a transaction that includes the assumption of $4.2 million in cash on InStranet's balance sheet. This deal is grander in scale than any of Salesforce.com's previous acquisitions; the company's past purchases have been small one-off technology ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom on Tuesday for $105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering. Peeling the onion and t...

The two largest electronic prescription networks have decided to merge. By joining together their two platforms, RxHub and SureScripts maintain that both doctors and patients will benefit. Having one integrated system gives doctors more information about patients' health insurance plans as well as r...

Oracle has reached an agreement to buy Skywire, a firm that makes software for the insurance business, as the database and applications giant continues to build out its menu of industry-specific tools. The purchase of Skywire marks the second consecutive acquisition in the insurance space for the vo...

Amdocs and IBM have entered into an original equipment manufacturer agreement in which Amdocs will embed the IBM DB2 Data Server and the IBM Optim Data Growth application in its CRM product line. It is the first OEM agreement IBM has inked involving Optim, Steve Tallant, senior manager of product li...

INSIGHTS

A Busy Week by the Bay

They may be still waiting for the first signs of the much advertised recession in the Bay Area. Everything I see here, especially this week, points to growth and all that goes with it. Multiple people have come up to me, phoned or e-mailed seeking introductions or support as they confess to having i...

Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition fe...

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