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Last week, the train officially pulled into the station; we got a call from Tranquility Base -- choose your metaphor. Salesforce.com announced availability of Summer '07 which included final delivery of the long-awaited Apex programming language -- the last piece of the developer platform. From here...

Some 9.1 percent of families in the U.S. do not have a deposit account of any type, according to a recent household survey from the Federal Reserve. This market segment lives check to check and typically avoids opening bank accounts because of a lack of funds combined with a deep distrust of banks.

It's just a hunch, but I think that NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson will not have the same problems with the SEC regarding his IPO that Marc Benioff had a couple of years ago when he took Salesforce.com public. You might recall that Benioff was slapped with a large fine for speaking about his impending IPO...

It's hard to avoid comparisons between Microsoft and Salesforce.com this week. While many see a zero sum game being played out in which Google plus Salesforce.com somehow equals a diminished Microsoft, I think there's more. In each case, we see major technology companies building elegant products fo...

A miracle year comes along very rarely, though any single year could be one depending on the subject matter. For example, as a member of Red Sox nation, 2004 will always be a miracle year for me, because my team won the World Series after 86 years of futility -- the Cubs are still waiting for their...

If you want to see who's winning at retaining and attaining higher-than-ever customer loyalty, look no further than what is really happening inside sales reps, call center reps, their managers, and for that matter, their CEO. What is it? It's nothing on the outside -- while a new CRM system on a ho...

Do we still need venture capitalists in the software industry? Sounds like a no-brainer, but the question also reflects the disruption that is taking place in enterprise software -- initiated by Salesforce.com and accelerated with its unveiling of a company incubator in San Mateo, Calif. For the re...

Some 90 percent of brand owners outsource at least some of their manufacturing, according to AMR Research. In addition, more than half of them expect to increase their use of contract outsourcing over the next two years. While it's been shown that outsourcing adds significant value -- and jobs -- to...

Last week, I got into the idea of evolution as it relates to the technology market and used Microsoft and Salesforce.com to illustrate the need to keep multiple plans percolating so that a company can take advantage of a move in the market. Evolution is an important filter through which I view the w...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced its latest acquisition to the world. CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year. However, it ...

Two things impressed me about Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release: the community portal and the influence of the IdeaExchange on the direction of the product. A lot of people point to the portal as the more significant and I suppose it is, but maybe only by a whisker. At the end of the day, each is...

Do you want revolutionary improvements in IT quality and speed-to-solution with dramatic reductions in cost? Consider an organization-wide Web services delivery strategy. Today, businesses demand three key outcomes from IT: delivering faster technology solutions to a growing group of stakeholders; r...

Six to eight weeks. That's about what it seems to take to get an on-demand solution up and running these days. This information comes from an analysis of nine on-demand vendors that we surveyed for our annual WizKids report which will be out this week. What's good about that time interval is that ...

I got a lot of mail on the piece I wrote last week about retail data collection. The mail ran two to one in support, but it was still interesting to gauge the reactions of those who think the notion of collecting data like ZIP codes, drivers license numbers and the like is kosher. Let me say again ...

About 51 percent of organizations contacted for a recent study by Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm are using at least one on-demand application. This finding was not surprising to Rebecca Wettemann, Nucleus Research's vice president, because even though the technology has been around for only a s...