CRM

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku, a cloud application platform. It will pay about $212 million in cash, net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of January 2011 if everything goes well. Salesforce.co...

Well, it's Wednesday at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce in San Francisco, and the excitement is palpable. A huge crowd stood in line waiting for the doors to the keynote conference room to open, which they did at about 8:15 a.m. They were supposed to open at 8. Once again, Salesforce.com chairman and CE...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vi...

Salesforce.com has added 50 new features to Force.com, which it will roll out on Wednesday, company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said. He disclosed the information during his keynote speech opening the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center Tuesday. Benioff also described what...

Salesforce.com at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco today debuted a database in the cloud service, Database.com, that combines attractive heterogeneous features for a virtual data tier for developers of all commercial, technical and open source persuasions. Salesforce.com is upping the ante...

It's about 8:20 a.m. on Tuesday in San Francisco, and Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" is playing as people file into a conference room at the Moscone Center for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's speech here at Dreamforce 2010. Well, yes -- the doors to the room where keynotes will be given opened al...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled Database.com, which it called the first enterprise database for the cloud. This is "the exact same database technology" as Salesforce.com's existing database but is "being packaged and provided as a standalone product so people can build platforms on their own tech...

NetSuite CRM+ is a customer relationship management tool that provides users with more than just standard customer service functionality. NetSuite's system gives users the capability to run their entire business by providing a single view of the customer. "NetSuite provides a complete business manag...

Among the many announcements that will no doubt be emanating from Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference next week will be this: TreeHouse Interactive, a SaaS partner relationship management provider, will join AppExchange. When it does, it will provide the first independent PRM offering on the site...

It's always fun to see the flood of articles this time of year about the holidays. "Is Your CRM Ready for Christmas?" the headlines knowingly ask. "Are You Facing a Christmas E-Commerce Customer Experience Crisis?" "The Holidays: Will You Survive? Will Your Family Survive?" OK, I stole that last one...

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try so...

Nutshell CRM officially launched earlier this month. It is, like many startup CRM applications, focused primarily on the sales piece. Nutshell is quite different from other CRM startups in one respect: It is focusing on a long-ignored niche -- the mid-sized company. "There are different consideratio...

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away, and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy, people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits. The company did a smart thing by turning on its new colla...

TCO is a financial estimate that helps enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a system. TCO goes beyond the initial purchase price or implementation cost to consider the full cost of an asset over its useful life. TCO and ROI are frequently confused and misused, but they actually...

Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2, a Web-based platform designed to help companies handle their customer service needs, includes integration with Salesforce Chatter, the service provider's new real-time collaboration tool. "Service Cloud is the fasting-growing product offering," said Fergus Griffin, ...