E-Commerce Blog

SAP’s business has been stable since late October when the software giant cut its outlook, a top executive said on Friday, defying signs of a worsening global economy. “It hasn’t gotten any worse,” SAP co-Chief Executive Leo Apotheker said during a panel discussion in New York. Later he added in an interview: “There’s business out there. We continue to move ahead.” The comments by SAP, the world’s biggest maker of business management software, are the latest glimmer of optimism in the global tech sector during the financial crisis.

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SAP Co-CEO Apotheker: Worst May Be Behind Us

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features — as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions. The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for Sales — five mini-applications that provide enterprise data and service leveraging Web 2.0 content. In this version, Oracle has updated Siebel Self-Service, including Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce applications, with industry-specific customer self-service applications.

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Siebel Suite Gets Major Overhaul

Search and databases often have troubled relationships. Web-based search utilities have become essential business tools. The database is the lifeblood of many a business’ record-keeping system. Both are vital — just don’t try to put the two together or integrate spreadsheets and other documents with them. For example, searching just doesn’t exist with Oracle or Microsoft Access. Users with technical skills can build a structured query, but these products do not have the sort of simple search features found at Google’s or Yahoo’s home pages, for instance.

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TrackVia: Powerful Search Tool for All the Nooks and Crannies

In this episode of BriefingsDirect Insights Edition, our experts examine the state of Microsoft at the onset of the annual Professional Developers Conference. Two narratives emerge from our roundtable discussion, that Microsoft is behind on many new IT trends and is tied to past business models. The opposing view is that Microsoft will ride pedestrian app dev, business intelligence, data services, Xbox, unified communications, virtualization and cloud computing to become bigger and more pervasive than ever.

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Ruminations on Microsoft’s Future

You can’t say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrate Facebook and Salesforce.com. Amazingly, despite all of the talk about marrying social media and CRM that has taken place over the last two to three years, it was not any of the larger and older — and richer — software giants that made the announcement.

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Nimble Salesforce Scoops Sluggish Giants With Facebook Play