Although the major news at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce developer conference was Visualforce, CEO Marc Benioff had a few other surprise announcements up his sleeve to keep an overflow audience interested in listening to almost all of his two-hour keynote address.
This week Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, "extend the value proposition of software as a service" when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco.
FaceTime Communications, a maker of network security appliances, announced the USG (Unified Security Gateway), one of the first devices directed at the full gamut of UC (unified communications) services, this week.
Unified communications (UC) vendors continue to pile on new products as UC begins to include more high-tech categories in its feature set.
In a deal that makes both companies look good, Salesforce.com announced that Omniture, one of the leaders in online Web marketing analytics, will be the newest service to join AppExchange.
With IBMs launch earlier this month of Lotus Notes 8 and this week's unveiling of Lotus SameTime Version 8, industry analysts say we are beginning to see the evolution of the e-mail client from a communications tool into a coordination channel. And when that happens, IBM may be in the unprecedented position of getting a second chance at knocking off longtime market leader Microsoft Outlook.
Reminiscent of so many software wars before it, such as the war over word processors, productivity suites, and the battle of the browsers, the latest clash is now taking place over UC (unified communications).
This week's announcement of a joint venture between business intelligence vendor Business Objects and one of the world's leading sources for financial data, Thomson Financial, goes well beyond a simple partnership deal, say industry analysts.
Two years in the making, IBM's Lotus division has finally unveiled version 8 of Lotus Notes and Domino.
Earlier this month the Business Software Alliance (BSA) upped the ante from US$200,000 to $1 million for anyone who turns in a company that is illegally circumventing software licensing agreements.
NetSuite, the other hosted CRM company, laid out version 2007.0 this week of its CRM, ERP, and PRM (partner relationship management) SaaS (software as a service) solution.
Twenty yeas from now a new generation of computer users will look back on the operating systems of today with the same bemused smile we look back at the cars of the <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=1959+cadillac&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2" target="_blank">late 1950s and early 60s</a>. They had huge fins, were the size of a small yacht and burned up just about as much gas.
At Interop, the high tech industry's major networking conference, a little-noticed partnership announcement between WhereNet, designers of active RFID location systems, and Cisco may be far more significant than anyone realizes.
Looking to regain its lost momentum, Dell announced on Thursday Project Hybrid, a revamped strategy for selling its products to enterprises.
If there was any question about whether the ERP market was in turmoil, the recent shakeup in senior management at ERP stalwart SAP that pushed out rising star Shai Agassi should have answered it. The shakeup at usually sedate SAP underscored the frayed nerves in the corporate boardroom of many leading ERP vendors, as technologies such as SOA and Web services enable enterprises to turn to smaller vendors and service providers who can deliver applications that meet their demands for speed, flexibility, and low overhead.
