Enterprise Apps

LiveOps is a cloud-based company that has two businesses. It began by providing call center outsourcing services through a network of more than 20,000 independent home-based agents, then began offering its contact center Platform as a Service. Monster.com describes LiveOps as the nation's largest do...

Email marketing has been a mainstay marketing tool for 10 years or more. When social media's clout with consumers became apparent -- Facebook now has 500 million users and counting -- there was much talk about whether email marketing was even still relevant. Email marketing providers responded quick...

At Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2010 conference this week, EDL Consulting showed off version 2.0 of CloudCraze, which it touts as the first e-commerce platform built natively on Force.com. CloudCraze is claimed to provide the functionality of more expensive enterprise multi-channel commerce packages ...

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff devoted much of his keynote speech at Dreamforce on Wednesday on lashing out at Microsoft. "There are forces out there that want to stop us," Benioff told his audience at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco. "We're trying to transform our industry, and when you ...

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...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

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...

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...

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...

Selling teams continue searching for ways to reduce the amount of time sales representatives spend uncovering relevant company or contact information before following up with the leads introduced to them within the pipeline. In December 2009 and January 2010, Aberdeen surveyed more than 500 executiv...

I spent part of last week in the Seattle area at a small meeting Microsoft organized for analysts. The purpose was to brief us on product positioning and plans, and much of the meeting was covered by non-disclosure. Consequently, I am at a loss for how much I can divulge in this setting, at least ...

In life and in business, the old saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" fundamentally could apply to everything -- except when it comes to display advertising. Remarketing has disproved that old adage time and time again by affording just that: a second chance to reinforc...

Avaya has introduced its latest iteration of Avaya IP Office -- its flagship communications suite for small and medium-sized businesses. The high points of the upgrade are easier-to-use features, greater transparency into coworkers' presence, and a more intuitive interface. For starters, Avaya IP Of...

Cisco on Wednesday announced two products and a rich media capture platform to extend its contact center capabilities. One product is SocialMiner, software that lets companies search the Web for relevant material. The other product is Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care ...