John Taschek

Bucking the trend in the CRM space is Salesnet, a hosted CRM service provider that barely provides any CRM functionality—and is proud of it. Instead, Salesnet focuses on SFA (sales force automation). Although CRM and SFA are inextricably linked, there are differences between the two: SFA is all about getting sales employees running efficiently, and […]

Salesforce.com, a finalist in this years Excellence Awards program, is among the most complete CRM packages weve tested and is especially well-thought-out for the hosted space. Salesforce.com turned in best-of-class performance in a benchmark that Keynote Systems Inc. ran for us and had 100 percent uptime during the testing phase—the only ASP we tested that […]

Compared with other midmarket hosted CRM solutions, NetLedgers application is in a class by itself—a position that opens it up to unrelenting attacks by its competitors. NetLedger has evolved its eponymously named application from an accounting and math package to part of a fully functional CRM package: NetSuite, released last December. eWEEK Labs tested NetSuite […]

Microsofts much-bally-hooed MS-CRM 1.0 has shown itself to be a good Version 1 CRM product. It has its quirks and architectural limitations, but, overall, it is a sophisticated application. Microsoft has also shown that it is moving quickly in this space. A major quirk that popped up in MS-CRMs e-mail tracking system (the system tagged […]

AMDs Opteron microprocessor is by far the most interesting thing to happen in the server chip world in the last two years. It put Intel into reaction mode, forcing the company to change how it would optimize 32-bit applications on the Itanium 2 by introducing the IA-32 Execution Layer. The Opteron has also left Sun […]

Is it possible that something once pronounced Bipple and now Be-PEL is shaking up the Web services world? Is something as dry as Business Process Execution Language signaling an important split in Web services standards groups? Are Microsoft, IBM and BEA icing Oracle and Sun and their customers? The answer to each is yes. The […]

With Opteron, the best we can hope for is that the marvelous 64-bit processor wont be buried by AMDs marketing bungles. Unfortunately, it looks like AMD is still bungling, much to the chagrin of the IT community. AMDs rationale for 64-bit computing is in line with most industry thinking. Sixty-four-bit systems are necessary because the […]

Just when we thought the economic climate for IT couldnt get worse, it did. Larry Ellison drove another stake through the heart of tech-sector optimism when he told The Wall Street Journal recently that at least 1,000 Silicon Valley companies should go bankrupt. The comments were vintage Ellison: utterly self-serving—and wrong. There are an estimated […]

Adobe Systems Inc.s Acrobat—the pre-eminent tool for generating documents in the popular PDF file format—is now easier to use and is more tightly integrated into commonly used applications. Its also not just a single product anymore. With Version 6.0, Adobe splits its PDF publishing software into three separate tools. Acrobat Elements is a simple Windows-only […]

Windows Server 2003 has been released to manufacturing and is ready to be launched to a community that is going to be hard pressed to pay for it. These days, IT budgets are under intense pressure from corporate chief financial officers. Microsoft, of course, realizes this. Thats why the company has been attempting to make […]