Today salesforce.com publicly announced the acquisition of Koral which is a Content Collaboration system company. You would think this news would fare well with the market but a Cowen analyst decided to rain on their parade and issue a downgrade. The negative news drove the stock price down 4%. Koral CEO Mark Suster posted the [...]

Just like any industry where demand exceeds supply, there is a shortage of resources. Basic economics. So what happens when enough people want to implement a CRM system but there just isn’t enough system integrators or engineers available? You are left with two options as a result — crappy rollouts by average consultants or wait [...]

The world is being “disrupted,” and that’s a good thing, said IDC. At its Directions show here this week, the company made some predictions regarding changes in IT and how to find the good in them. If you believe Frank Gens, senior vice president of research at IDC, one of those changes is that Salesforce.com [...]

You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy applications where all the really important data lives. With its recent announcement of ApexConnect, an integration tool to connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back [...]

In 2005, just a week after announcing its plans to acquire CRM giant Siebel Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. executives took to the stage at the annual OpenWorld conference and pledged to continue to support and develop Siebel’s successful Software as a Service (SaaS) offering Siebel OnDemand. It was an easy decision. While Siebel was struggling [...]

Continuing its effort to reduce the cost and complexity of linking its hosted CRM software to other applications, Salesforce.com Inc. recently announced a series of additional integration capabilities. The San Francisco-based vendor said it plans to offer a set of packaged connectors for tying its customer relationship management tools to Oracle Corp.’s E-Business Suite 11i [...]

Salesforce.com has further opened up its programming platform, allowing users to enhance and change the way its online customer relationship management application functions. The Apex programming language is already used for Saleforce’s hosted CRM, but was not available to outside developers. The language is scheduled for release in mid-2007. Apex will allow users to change [...]

Granted, it’s only been one day since Salesforce.com announced Apex, its new programming language and platform. Not enough time for anyone to really digest what’s going on, right? Wrong. The response to Apex from customers (and, not surprisingly, partners) has really been overwhelmingly positive. I spent a good amount of time Oct. 9 and Oct. [...]

The CRM market may be returning to its glory years, according to AMR Research’s latest Market Analytix Report. Despite continued consolidation among the CRM suite vendors, the market grew 8 percent in 2005, which marks the second consecutive year of growth for CRM. SAP and Oracle continue to jockey for the top market-share position, Microsoft [...]

The end of software as we know it? That’s what Salesforce.com is proposing when it launches its customer relationship management (CRM) suite in native Thai next month.