Stories about: Salesforce.com

When Apple launched its new App Store earlier this year, the assumption was that scads of businesses would develop applications for their iPhone-toting customers. Although there are more than 60 apps in the App Store's Business category, virtually no big-name companies have bothered to cough up one of their own. Since Apple plans to make at least 40 million iPhones in the next year, many of which will no doubt end up being used in the workplace, what's the holdup?

Data-integration vendor Jitterbit released the 2.0 version of its platform on Monday, adding another entry to a growing group of open-source alternatives to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM, SAS and Informatica.

Pity the poor road warrior who tried to find his data on The Linkup, only to get this message when he logged in: "Unfortunately The Linkup service is no longer available. Please visit box.net for your storage needs." What's worse, the sales guy was on an extended trip through North and South America. That's a real story, told by one Jacob Sherman, "I just want my data," he said.

Gartner has named cloud computing, green IT and social-computing platforms among technologies that are poised to reach broad enterprise adoption in the next two to five years.

There's more at stake than lost productivity when application response times slow to a standstill. Company revenue also takes a hit.

A technical problem hit an undetermined number of Gmail users, including paying subscribers to the Google Apps hosted software suite, locking them out of their accounts for about 15 hours on Wednesday and early Thursday.

Here's an interesting strategy for a new software company: create applications that place you squarely in the competitive sights of Google and Microsoft, bypass venture capital funding, and rebuff an acquisition offer from Salesforce.com, the surging software as a service (SaaS) company that delivers its products over the Web.

Lycos has released a new Web-publishing tool based on Google's OpenSocial API that allows users to create Web sites that take advantage of social networks, the company said Tuesday.

The battle to provide social networking in the enterprise is under way between solutions from established software vendors and readily available offerings such as Facebook and LinkedIn, with these sites possessing a lot of momentum, an industry insider stressed during a conference on Friday afternoon.

It's no secret that maintenance and support for enterprise applications is wildly profitable for vendors and, likewise, incredibly expensive for IT shops. Some of those IT shops, in fact, are overwhelmed by the cost and find too little return to justify paying for it.

Mobility and software as a service are changing customer relationship management and sales force software. Upstart Salesforce.com has made a significant dent in the market, and established vendors of licensed software are playing catchup. SAP AG's recent alliance with Research in Motion Inc. is the latest development as CRM vendors try to meet customer growing demand for mobility. And user interfaces are evolving to meet the expectations of people who have grown up with the Web.