Renee Boucher Ferguson

Some startling numbers emerged from Salesforce.coms fourth-quarter earnings announcement on Feb. 21, including a 58 percent increase in sales—the company added an impressive 90,000 net new subscribers for the quarter—tempered by a 91 percent drop in quarterly profits, mainly as a result of spending on the business. Now the company has outlined its strategy for […]

Microsoft is honing in on business process management with the formation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and the release of a BPM roadmap that will include a key standard—Business Process Execution Language—in the Windows Workflow Foundation. The company announced Feb. 26 at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego that it has formed the […]

Hurricanes in Florida. Floods in Louisiana. Fires in California. CEOs in hot water over regulatory concerns. Couple those issues with a cyclical profit-and-loss business model that tries to factor in the unknown, and theres a potential recipe for trouble for insurance companies. Around 2000, Chubb, a global company that specializes in insuring individuals and companies […]

Henning Kagermann is staying on as CEO at SAP AG through May 31, 2007, the companys board announced on Feb. 15. Kagermanns contract was set to expire at the end of the year. The 59-year-old executive will turn 60 in July; under SAPs bylaws, board member who are 60 and older have their employment contracts […]

Salesforce.com is building momentum around its Apex on-demand programming language and development platform, hiring seasoned staff to evangelize the technology and holding packed-to-the-rafters seminars and webinars to familiarize developers with the Apex code. Its still very early days for Apex. The programming language code, in beta now, was released in January, and it wont be […]

Microsoft is pushing business intelligence capabilities into its customer relationship management software, following a trend by many in the business applications market to include analysis capabilities in their applications. Microsoft announced Feb. 12 the availability of its namesake Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation, tools that enable analysis and management of customer-facing processes. The goal with Analytics […]

Hewlett-Packard is continuing to build out its software and solutions management offerings through acquisitions, the latest being the Feb. 5 purchase of Bristol Technology. Bristol develops two software suites, TransactionVision and Cross-Platform Solutions. TransactionVision lets companies track business process transactions, similar to monitoring packages as they are sent through the overnight delivery process. Cross-Platform Solutions, […]

A Canadian company, Syscan, has been awarded a patent by its countrys Patent Office that may help lower the cost of RFID tags, Syscans officials said. The patent is for technology dubbed iCE, or I Communicate Effectively, which uses the concepts of low-power wireless communication networks. The patent covers 20 different aspects of iCE technology, […]

No longer solely the province of niche or regional ISVs, midmarket customers are suddenly a hot commodity. Business Objects announced Feb. 5 that it is joining the ranks of software developers investing millions to reach the midmarket, a demographic often described as fragmented and hard to reach. However, the midmarket is also a segment that […]

Oracle officials on Jan. 31 announced the next versions of the companys five major enterprise resource planning suites and outlined the rationale for why customers should upgrade to the new versions of the software as well as to Fusion, Oracles next-generation suite that is still in the works. While customers seemed excited with the latest […]