Enterprise Apps

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear d...

Siebel led a list of top CRM applications ranked according to their size and expertise in eight vertical markets in a recent IDC report. Not surprisingly, Oracle's other CRM solutions -- thanks to multiple acquisitions over the last several years -- also dominate a majority of the categories. Howeve...

RFID initiatives introduced by the Department of Defense and private sector providers such as Savi Technology or Boeing are driving greater use of the technology in the aerospace and defense industries. Unlike Wal-Mart's RFID initiative in the consumer goods space, though, the Department of Defense'...

SAS has upgraded its marketing automation and marketing optimization applications with new functionality. While not a point release, the upgrades are worth noting because of their inclusion -- for the first time -- of digital marketing. First though, to give the marketing automation and optimizatio...

Microsoft plans to ship a retooled version of its Dynamics CRM 3.0 application when Office 2007 and Windows Vista ship at the end of November. The compatibility upgrade is one strategy the company is using to encourage corporate buyers to adopt the new Vista-Office bundle. Feature-wise, the upgraded...

SalesGene, a startup that worked a niche category of sales force automation called "marketing sales effectiveness," has renamed itself and repositioned its product in order to better serve its potential buyers. The firm is now called "Landslide Technologies," echoing the name of the firm's portal-li...

eGain Communications has released the latest iteration of its self-service application, eGain Service 7.6. New features include guidance on complex customer interactions and tweaks to security, as well as additional process improvement. Such incremental gains in functionality -- across the self-serv...

NetSuite has introduced a new development platform that gives both users and partners deeper customization capabilities for their respective needs. Called "SuiteFlex," the platform gives customers the tools to build their own workflows and user interfaces -- for example, a billing application that r...

Oracle and IBM are leveraging the multi-million dollar investments they have made in their Linux product lines by joining forces to collaborate on the sales and marketing of Oracle applications for Linux on System z. This collaborative effort has been driven in large part by customer demand, Frank ...

Oracle is offering to support clients' PeopleSoft and Siebel applications in its own data center -- a managed service option that it has offered with its own Oracle applications for the last few years. Oracle is including these new offerings in its On Demand portfolio, although the name is confusin...

At its first CRM customer summit, held this week in San Diego, Microsoft announced the availability of tools to integrate its Dynamics CRM application with competing ERP back-end systems. Called "Solution Accelerators," the integration packages connect via BizTalk Server. They are available for Orac...

Of all the CRM subsector technologies, sales force automation is the most mature. Expecting dramatic change in this category, therefore, would be akin to expecting the radical realignment of a general accounting ledger package. Yet, over the last year or so, dramatic change is exactly what has oc...

There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however. The big announcement was A...

Salesforce.com has opened its code to outside developers for the first time with the introduction of Apex, a new multi-tenant programming language and platform. Companies will be able to use Apex to tailor or reprogram their Salesforce.com deployments or build entirely new components within the appl...

Oracle's Fusion -- its middleware designed to help customers use the various enterprise suites and applications it has acquired over the last few years -- has been incorporated into PeopleSoft Financial Management 9, the first new release of the application in eighteen months. "The application has a...