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SAP won a battle in its war with Oracle Thursday when a judge overturned the $1.3 billion sum SAP was previously ordered to pay Oracle in a copyright infringement suit. The dispute regarded SAP's TomorrowNow software maintenance unit, which was accused of skirting licensing fees by downloading hundr...

Shortly before Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference kicked off this year, with its accompanying slew of new offers and products, Microsoft Dynamics CRM played a little offense: The company rolled out a "Cloud CRM for Less" offer, which grants $150 in cash per user seat to any customer that switche...

One of the announcements Marc Benioff made in his Day 1 keynote here at Dreamforce was Database.com. The news is that Salesforce is now enabling its customers to store their data on their own hardware inside their data centers. There is a need -- or at least a demand -- for this capability, as man...

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk, and technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it. But one thing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said early on really stuck in my head. He...

Salesforce.com kicked off its 9th Dreamforce conference with a slew of new features, services and products, as well as an offering that represents a surprising shift for the cloud-evangelizing company: the ability to store data on premises for security-conscious companies. Although lost somewhat ami...

There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce. For some reason, I don't understand why Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year, which is fortunate for two reasons: Hurricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the East Coast ov...

Salesforce.com has been front and center the past couple of weeks, revving up for its Dreamforce '11 cloud computing industry event, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is expected to draw more than 40,000 registered attendees and showcase 1,000 solutions ...

SAS is beefing up its SAS Social Media Analytics application with new features that give users a better handle on their social media effectiveness: improved tracking of past versus present performance, and benchmarks to assess competitors' performance. "A lot of this functionality seems as though it...

As is so sadly the case with many environment-oriented subjects, Green IT was consigned to the back burner at a lot of businesses when the economy began grinding its gears several years ago. The same thing happened to a lesser extent to some potentially game-changing CRM strategies, most notably mob...

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or...

During the past few years, customer service organizations have faced increasing amounts of pressure to deliver better service over a broader range of channels including the Web, email and phone. Customers expect to get service at any time of the day or night and assume that customer service teams wi...

NanoRep, the developer of a help-desk application that employs a self-learning knowledge base, has just taken its fledging product global. An automatic language conversion feature now translates information into 34 languages, explained nanoRep CEO Doron Herzich. "The system can learn which language ...

Sales has had a rough couple of years. Although customers have been harder to find, the pressure on sales pros to produce has become ever greater. In some U.S. firms, the lowest-performing 40 percent of the sales force is replaced annually. In other businesses, departures or layoffs of sales staff a...

The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, who is no stranger to the speaking circuit and a believer in making CRM entertaining. Idol, as the name implies, is a competition focused on emerging companies, and it...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...