Salesforce.com highlights analytics
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com is drawing particular attention to the analyticsÂ customization capabilitiesÂ it plans to offer in the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, known as Salesforce Winter '07. At an event due to take place Wednesday in London, Marc Benioff, the vendor's chairman and chief executive officer, is expected to preview analytics and dashboard mash-up capabilities as part of his "Future of Software" presentation. The announcement is part of a gradual run-up to the release of Winter '07, theÂ 21st generation of the on-demand CRM software, which is due to become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. Analytics is loosely defined as the analysis of data contained in a company's enterprise applications to help highlight potential business trends. Being able to spot such trends early can help firms improve the speed and quality of their decision-making. Other CRM players including Microsoft, Oracle, and SAGÂ are increasingly placing more emphasis on their respective analytics offerings as key product differentiators. For instance, Oracle announced last month that it would add more real-time predictive analytics to its business intelligence, middleware, and applications afterÂ acquiring intellectual property assetsÂ from Sigma Dynamics. While the main theme of the current version, Salesforce Summer '06 which debuted in July, was integration between Salesforce.com's CRM offering and third-party products, the watchword for Winter '07 is "unlimited customization," according to Ariel Kelman, the vendor's director of AppExchange product marketing. Since Salesforce.com officially went live with AppExchange in January, a network to host third-party and custom applications and integrate them with Salesforce.com's CRM software, the vendor has seen plenty of demand for analytics offerings, he said. In Salesforce Winter '07 users will have the ability to fully componentize the on-demand CRM application's analytical dashboards so that they can mash up or bring together components of different vendors' business intelligence (BI) software which they can then share and manage. Users will be able to engage in a wide range of BI activities which can be displayed on their dashboards within Salesforce including supply chain analysis, complex what-if scenarios and profitability analysis. Business Objects is Salesforce.com's first BI partner to participate in an analytics mash-up between its Crystal Xcelsius data visualization offering and the hosted CRM software's dashboard framework, Kelman said. Other BI partners expected to support the mash-ups number around 13 initially and will include open-source player JasperSoft, he added. Analytics, e-mail marketing and sales tools have been the most popular offerings on AppExchange since January, but Kelman is already starting to see a second wave of component categories gaining more and more user interest. This next wave is around human resources, financials and IT tools, he said, along with project management, bug tracking and quality assurance. Although Salesforce.com remains focused on supplying hosted CRM, its AppExchange network continues to expand its capabilities to provide all kinds of business components, not just those with strong ties into CRM. Other features for Winter '07 include a new user interface based on Ajax or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, a hook-in to Cisco Systems' computer telephony integration option and full support for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software.
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Software developer Salesforce.com Inc. posted a sharp rise in second-quarter profit on better-than-expected revenue during its first quarter as a public company, but investors shunned the stock in late trading
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Latest figures from Salesforce.com show strong revenue growth, as the company drops hints about its biggest-ever customer.
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BusinessWeek Online - Salesforce.com's  shares gained on Dec. 12, after the software services provider hiked its forecasts on sales for 2008.
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Data from Coremetrics Web analytics informs virtually all of the site's search marketing efforts.
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With its eye firmly fixed on rival Salesforce.com, Siebel unveiled OnDemand Release 6 of its hosted CRM suite of applications last week, the first industry-specific version of its hosted software.
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Global Software, a developer of spreadsheet analytic tools, has added thre new customers and a distribution partner in recent weeks.
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Claiming Bloomberg and the Bloomberg Terminal lock customers in with a proprietary workstation and software accessed on an archaic keyboard, and that Bloomberg offers a deep but very narrow selection of financial feeds, Salesforce.com will announce on Tuesday a competitive Wealth Management Edition of its SaaS (Software as a Service) application for use by wealth management professionals.
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A major facelift and a lot of great new functionality!  The Sugar Team is excited to bring you the 2.0 release.  As you can see, hiring a UI engineer has taken the application to a whole new level of usability and appeal.  Who else has a pink UI?  We're also pleased to bring you the Leads module and significant improvements to the Contact module with vCard support and a simplified way of entering a contact, account and appointment in the single "Create from Business Card" screen.   You can send us an email any time with your feedback at contact@sugarcrm.com.  Our goal continues to be to build the sales automation system that you have always wanted, so your input is vital.  Check out http://www.sugarcrm.com for more details on the latest product roadmap, support forums, detailed product information and much more.  We hope you find this a useful tool for building your business.  Enjoy!  The Sugar Team    -=Included Features=- An overview of the features in this release.   Leads New to 2.0, put standardized processes into practice to make sure all sales reps use the same, consistent lead qualification methodology. With the click of a button, quickly turn leads into opportunities. With the Sugar Sales Leads module, you can also easily manage rented lists and prospect data separate from your customer data.  Import and Export Import contacts and accounts from CSV (comma separated values) files.  Users can also easily export data from the system to CSV files.  Opportunities Sugar Sales provides a complete, yet easy-to-use Opportunities module.  From deal size to each contactâs role, from listing the competitors to tracking the lead source, sales reps can easily manage each sales opportunity to completion.    Accounts & Contacts With the Accounts & Contacts module, you can easily enter and update key account and contact information. Tracking and staying in touch with your customers is simply a click away.   Activity & Task Management Managing your customer interactions is at the heart of a sales automation application. Sugar Sales provides a simple and clean set of tools for quickly tracking tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings.   Notes & Attachments Easily keep notes on every contact, opportunity or account. New to v1.5, add file attachments to notes.    Home Screen  Focus on the right activities with a quick view of your top opportunities, pipeline, today's appointments and task list.  Dashboard  A picture is always worth a thousand words.  With the dashboard module, you can graphically view how your opportunities breakdown by sales stage or industry.  New to v1.5, you can customize the charts to display the data you want.  Administration  Easily manage all the users in the system, their passwords, user interface themes and more.    -=Future Planned Features=- What we're working on next.   Internationalization  Support for local and localized date and time display.   Accounts & Contacts Easily sync customer contact information between Sugar Sales and MS Outlook and Palm devices.   Activity & Task Management Plug-ins for PDAs and email applications that deliver a best-in-class open source solution for tracking key customer information in your PDA quickly and easily.  Notes & Attachments Ability to enter HTML notes. Also provide for full-text searching across text or HTML notes as well as most file attachments.  Dashboard  More dashboard charts including the ability to customize the charts by time ranges, deal size and more.   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=107819&package_id=116411
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This integration enables a Salesforce.com customer to integrate and use StrikeIron's CRM-related Web services without having to leave their Salesforce.com account. &quot;By utilizing our Web Services Business Network, Salesforce.com users can be assured of the reliability and security required for their applications.&quot; said Richard Holcomb, CEO of StrikeIron.
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NetSuite 10.0 offers analysis tools to help businesses predict information about customers based on data they've already entered.
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Â Salesforce.com Inc. on Thursday released its first quarterly results since going public, posting income of $1.2 million on revenue of $40.6 million for the three months ended July 31.
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Everyone knows Salesforce.com Inc. as the company that pioneered software as a service (SAAS) and survived the dot-com bust when many other application service providers (ASPs) didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said the company is ready to take on Microsoft Corp. as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday.
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Details of a new Microsoft Web analytics tool are available online.
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Fund managers ahoy Salesforce.com is kicking off a series of CRM (customer relationship management) packages targeting financial services, starting with a hostile Wall Street.â¦
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Salesforce.com and Google team up, launch small-business tool that combines Google AdWords with Salesforce.com on-demand CRM.
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With 8 million customers around the globe ordering business cards, letterhead and other printed materials from its online venue, VistaPrint executives understand the power of Web analytics for uncovering customer trends. Getting the most of out their data was a matter of measuring -- and acting on -- the right metrics.