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Salesforce.com rolled out a new service on Wednesday that integrates business-contact information with its own CRM (customer relationship management) application and Chatter collaboration software. The service is the result of Salesforce.com’s $142 million acquisition of Jigsaw in April. Jigsaw’s database uses a crowd-sourcing model to collect data and keep it up to date. It now [...]

Microsoft plans to take a cue from rival CRM (customer relationship management) vendor Salesforce.com with the upcoming release of CRM 2011, by adding a marketplace site where partners can sell complementary applications. CRM 2011 will be available in beta form in September, starting with the Online edition. The Dynamics Marketplace, which echoes Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, will [...]

Oracle’s upcoming OpenWorld conference is set to broadly feature its long-awaited Fusion Applications, according to newly released agenda information for the show, which is scheduled for Sept. 19-23 in San Francisco. During his OpenWorld keynote last year, company CEO Larry Ellison pledged that Fusion Applications would finally become available this year, but since then, the [...]

On-demand BI (business intelligence) vendor Oco announced version 4.0 of its platform on Wednesday, a release that contains multiple new functions aimed at serving large enterprises. Some new features, such as support for multinational character sets and around-the-clock system availability, target the needs of companies with operations in multiple countries. Another alerts users in real [...]

Two relatively new arrivals in the computing industry announced a partnership to profit from the trend toward general-purpose cloud computing services on the Net. The first partner is VMware, an EMC subsidiary that specializes in virtualization technology that lets multiple operating systems run simultaneously on the same computer for greater operational flexibility. The second is [...]

Salesforce.com said Wednesday it has signed a deal to buy Jigsaw, a cloud-based vendor of business contact data, for roughly $142 million in cash. The acquisition, which appears to be one of Salesforce.com’s largest to date, is scheduled to close later this year. The acquisition will allow Salesforce.com and its partners to create new applications [...]

Oracle announced the 17th version of its on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) application Wednesday and made a fresh push into pharmaceutical sales with a Life Sciences edition of the software. New features in CRM on Demand Release 17 include tools for managing sales pipelines and performing forecasts of future business, a redesigned user interface, and [...]

SAP made a major new push into on-demand BI (business intelligence) Wednesday, announcing a new suite that combines all of SAP’s SaaS (software as a service) BI products and is aimed at “casual” users who are “underserved” by other products. Users won’t need prior training to start working with the suite, thanks to built-in guides [...]

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced the launch of a private program to 100 beta customers for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform first announced last year. Salesforce is positioning the new product as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes, which is really not an accurate portrayal, as Chatter is more about social-style communications integrated [...]

Mounting evidence suggests that in 2010, the hottest segment in BI (business intelligence) software will revolve around offerings delivered from the cloud, thanks to increased product sophistication, strained IT budgets, and other factors. A new IDC report finds the SaaS BI market will experience triple the growth of the market overall, soaring at a compound [...]