Renee Boucher Ferguson

As with the evolution of the Web—or maybe because of it—the area of business process management and integration is seeing its own progression, from basic process modeling and integration to complex integration and execution. To facilitate this growth, vendors are building out new functionality to help users orchestrate business process flows. Intalio, for example, announced […]

With an eye toward research and innovation, Alien Technology on Feb. 6 opened its RFID Solutions Center in Dayton, Ohio. Alien Technology, based in Morgan Hill, Calif., develops RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags and readers. The research center is a collaborative effort, in as much as its open to Alien hardware manufacturing competitors, as well as […]

Where were you when the software went out? Salesforce.com executives and the companys customers are apparently agreeing to disagree over outages and their root causes. On Jan. 30, Salesforce.coms servers were down for several hours between about 10 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. EST, according to Salesforce.com customers such as Mark Siler, vice president of IT […]

NEW YORK—Michael Michlovich, marketing and sales IT Director at DuPont, has no plans to migrate off of his Salesforce.com customer relationship management subscription. Hell use it right alongside the newer implementation of SAPs on-demand CRM applications, he said. “Well roll out SAP as business conditions present themselves,” Michlovich said. “There are a number of sales […]

Its official: Oracle confirmed that it completed the acquisition of Siebel Systems late in the day Jan. 31 after shareholders voted overwhelmingly to accept the $5.85 billion deal. After completing the merger, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed in a statement that his company “is now the undisputed leader in customer relationship management software.” “Oracles focus […]

After months of hinting, SAP AG will announce Feb. 2 its long-awaited platform for on-demand CRM software, at dual events in Palo Alto, Calif., and New York. But the competition for on-demand customers is fierce. Smaller niche players like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow Technologies have all been in the on-demand game for half a decade—and […]

Sybase Inc. subsidiary iAnywhere announced Jan. 30 at the Global RFID ROI Summit in London new software to help RFID hardware vendors develop “smart” readers. The radio-frequency identification Anywhere Appliance Edition is software that can be embedded on readers to help deploy advanced functionality for things like security and communication protocol support. The Anywhere Appliance […]

Salesforce.com, which has had several high-profile system outages over the past couple of months, is apparently still having issues. Salesforce.coms servers were down for several hours on Jan. 30, between about 10 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. Eastern, according to Salesforce.com customers. “Theyve had problems all morning,” said Mark Siler, vice president of IT at Priority […]

Microsoft Business Solutions, the applications division of Microsoft, is out of the red and into the black. The group posted $242 million in sales Jan. 26 for its second quarter of 2006—a $10 million profit for the heretofore losing division. For the second-quarter period last year, MBS lost $17 million on sales of $207 million. […]

Jumping the gun on Oracles imminent acquisition of Seibel Systems next week, the official Oracle users group announced Jan. 26 that the club is open to Siebel customers. Siebel users now have an open invitation to OAUGs (Oracle Applications User Group) Community Integration Initiative, which will enable those companies recently acquired by Oracle—some 13 companies […]

With a fervor not generally seen in earning calls, SAP AG laid out its plans for 2006—as well as for the next four years. During its Jan. 25 fourth-quarter and full-year 2005 earnings call, SAP said its goal for 2010 is to quadruple earnings by increasing the “addressable market” to $70 billion, 50 percent of […]

While Oracle has remained, out of necessity, relatively quiet about its plans with Siebel Systems, some details are starting to emerge. Oracle is expected to close the acquisition of CRM (customer relationship management) software developer Siebel on Jan. 31. The company has said publicly it will base its next-generation suite of CRM applications—Fusion CRM—on Siebels […]