Renee Boucher Ferguson

Salesforce.com Inc.s effort to enable other vendors to use its CRM service as a platform to deliver additional services is gathering steam and winning over more than a few converts. The company, based here, rolled out its AppExchange offering last week, along with the Winter 06 edition of its core customer relationship management application. With […]

Salesforce.com Inc. CEO Marc Benioff last week acknowledged the companys recent outages in an interview and said that “occasionally youre going to have some type of quirky architecture.” The remarks, made here at Salesforce.coms Winter 06 launch event, addressed the companys two confirmed outages, one on Dec. 20 that lasted nearly 6 hours and one […]

On the heels of preliminary fourth quarter results from last year that have SAP sailing into this year on increased software revenues, the company has merged its North American and Latin American business units to increase sales and market share. SAP recently announced that it had combined the two businesses to create one new unit, […]

With tax season gearing up to full throttle, TIAA-CREF customers straddling the 2005 to 2006 tax seasons are facing some potentially costly consequences due to information system snafus at the mutual fund giant. Because of problems with Open Plan Solutions and other IT system issues at TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association—College Retirement Equities Fund), […]

Industry analysts on Thursday questioned whether Oracle Corp. is anywhere close to reaching the halfway point in its effort to create the Fusion Applications. Oracle executives briefed media and analysts on the companys progress in developing the data model and specifications for its Fusion Applications, at an event Wednesday at San Franciscos City Hall. Thomas […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called in sick with the flu to the Oracle Fusion Event Wednesday evening at City Hall here, leaving company President Charles Phillips to take the lead in presenting in painstaking detail the technical specifications for next-generation enterprise application suite. What had been called Project Fusion is now named Fusion Applications […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com began its campaign to turn its on-demand customer relationship management service into a development platform for Web applications with the official introduction of AppExchange here Tuesday. The company rolled out AppExchange along with the Winter 06 edition of its core CRM application at the type of event that has become Saleforce.coms hallmark; it […]

Charlie Crystle, CEO of Mission Research, a developer of fund-raising software for nonprofit organizations, based in Lancaster, Pa., dropped on-demand software vendor Salesforce.com Inc. over recent outages. Cliff Bell, CIO of Phoenix Technologies Ltd., a developer of embedded software in Milpitas, Calif., is forgiving about outages. And Melissa Caylor, director of IT at mortgage broker […]

TIAA-CREF pensioners, frustrated with the companys inability to respond to ongoing fund disbursement issues, are seeking relief from oversight organizations. Several TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association—College Retirement Equities Fund) pensioners have notified eWEEK that they are lodging formal complaints with the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) and with the New York State Insurance Department. […]

Siebel System Inc.s earnings released Thursday, although better than expected, failed to impress some financial analysts watching the company closely. The consensus among these analysts is that Siebels expected 30 to 38 percent increase in 2005 fourth-quarter software sales isnt by any stretch a turnaround for the long-suffering CRM (customer relationship management) software developer. Rather, […]