Stacy Cowley

SAP AG made its long-awaited dive into the hosted, subscription CRM (customer relationship management) "on demand" market on Thursday, launching a new software service with a starting monthly price tag of US$75 per user. But SAP won't be going head-to-head with on-demand trailblazers like Salesforce.com Inc.: Its system carries a 100-user minimum, restricting its potential customers to the enterprise clients SAP traditionally targets.

Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM (customer relationship management) service had a widespread outage on Monday, the second time in recent weeks the on-demand software provider has suffered a serious crash.

The federal judge presiding over NTP Inc.'s long-running patent dispute with Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) has scheduled a Feb. 24 hearing to consider imposing an injunction on RIM's BlackBerry sales and service.

Salesforce.com Inc. went live this week with a heavily publicized major update, adding a new platform called AppExchange for easily deploying third-party applications to extend the functionality of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) system.

IBM Corp. shipped the latest version of its Alphablox analytics software last week, adding deeper integration support for linking the software with its Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Portal Server products.

Salesforce.com's forthcoming next version, Winter '06, will introduce the Salesforce Sandbox, a service that enables customers to replicate their existing Salesforce.com deployments to create a test environment for trying out new customizations and developing add-on applications. With one click, customers will be able to launch a Sandbox system containing a complete copy of their organization's production Salesforce.com database. The company announced the service on Monday.

If CRM vendor Saleforce.com Inc. has its way, client-server-based applications will be diminished, as on-demand business models gain momentum. rnAnd we can count on this happening sooner...

Microsoft Corp. plans to begin shipping Microsoft Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) 3.0 on Tuesday, finally releasing to customers the first major update to the CRM software Microsoft launched three years ago. Microsoft CRM's 3.0 version fills in functionality gaps that had left Microsoft lagging behind its midmarket rivals.