Business Software Dispatch

After leaving Goldmine in the early 2000s, Jon Ferrara set out to tackle what he saw as the coming social CRM revolution by starting Nimble. Boy was he ever on track. Now with companies, enterprises, and small businesses all over the world trying to figure out the best way to harness social media, products like Nimble CRM are most definitely going to lead the Enterprise 2.0 revolution by putting social squarely at the forefront of business. The key aim of Nimble's web-based social CRM is to provide small businesses with a unified platform from which to manage not only their customer ... READ MORE

CRM providers operate in a crowded market that consists of a handful of big players like Salesforce.com competing against many smaller solutions that offer different takes on a proven model. One has to be truly visionary to make a splash in this market, and that's exactly what Pipedrive has managed to do. Based in San Francisco and Estonia, the company has created a cloud-based software solution that allows you to visualize the sales process from start to finish. In the company's own words, Pipedrive is not a CRM tool - it's a "pipeline tool" that is supposed to replace traditional ... READ MORE

Twitter can be a powerful tool for businesses to communicate and engage with their customer base. With Twitter, companies can directly interact with their current and potential customers, build their brand, and deliver customer service. With social media tools like Twitter playing such an important role within many companies, a whole crop of Twitter apps and plugins have been created to improve social media management. On Tuesday, Buffer and its advantages were discussed. Today, we'll discuss the advantages of HootSuite. HootSuite -Darlene Lin I confess I haven’t really used Buffer. I use and recommend HootSuite because it works and it’s easy to use. It ... READ MORE

Workday, founded in 2005 by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield when they left PeopleSoft after its hostile takeover by Oracle, has been growing more and more prominent in the enterprise software space; and the company is turning heads, especially since the news of their $85M series F funding of last October. Their SaaS solutions for human capital management, payroll, and most recently financial management, has put Workday HCM on our list of enterprise software companies to watch in the coming months and years. Because the company seems to have had a clear vision for where the technology industry is headed, given ... READ MORE

Shortly after Twitter established itself as a social media network of note (it's currently second only to Facebook), developers jumped on the opportunity to create Twitter apps. The hottest of these to have come out in a while is Buffer, which allows Twitter users to schedule their updates for Twitter's peak times. The benefit: if you have something to say or see something you like, you can announce it to the world at a time when you have the best chance of other users seeing it. But doesn't HootSuite do the same - and hasn't it been doing that for ... READ MORE

Yesterday, we talked about how giants like Oracle may be losing ground as a hardware provider thanks to the continuing growth of SaaS and Cloud solutions. But, hardware may not be the only segment that Oracle is losing its dominance in. IBM, a leader in its own right as a software and hardware provider, recently announced that it would be dropping Siebel in favor of SugarCRM as its CRM system. IBM is the second big company to replace Siebel in recent months. Earlier, HP also dropped Siebel for Salesforce.com. Both companies had some of the largest Siebel deployments in the world. ... READ MORE

In the battle between hardware and software, it seems like hardware solutions are slowly losing out to SaaS and cloud solutions. Big data leaders like Google, Amazon, etc. are providing low-cost machines that run on open source software, which is making database implementations for small and medium size businesses easier and cheaper than ever. Though there's still plenty of room for large-scale hardware installations in the business world, when companies start turning towards database and analytics solutions that are far more affordable, where does that leave a giant hardware provider like Oracle vs SAP, which is offering smaller, lower cost solutions? Oracle ... READ MORE

The face of business software is changing rapidly with the advent of mobile applications and cloud solutions. Yet, the world of ERP remains fairly static. Many key ERP Software vendors are gradually moving into the mobile and cloud space, but where are the truly big ERP innovations? Oracle Fusion has been almost a decade in the making, and user adoption is extremely slow. SAP is rolling out HANA, but early reviewers seem frustrated with bugs and development issues. Perhaps this is the nature of ERP. It's not easy to implement, so many companies feel that once it's stable, the ERP solution ... READ MORE

Almost everyone has a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. Now, more and more employees are bringing these personal devices into the workplace and using applications such as Twitter and Facebook in the enterprise. Say hello to the consumerization of IT. According to a recent Gartner study, the consumerization of IT is one of the most significant trends that will be affecting IT for the next ten years. More than another industry buzzword, the consumerization of IT is changing the way employees work and the role of IT within the enterprise. What is the Consumerization of IT? The consumerization of IT does not refer ... READ MORE

This week, both Google and Microsoft announced their new cloud storage services, bringing up questions of whether rival Dropbox will continue to dominate in the cloud storage and file sharing sphere. On Monday, Microsoft announced new SkyDrive apps, updates to their cloud storage service, as well as the fact that they're reducing the amount of free storage from 25GB to 7GB. That seems like a huge decrease, but in their statement released Monday, Microsoft determined that 7GB was plenty of space for 99% of SkyDrive users. Existing users who want to keep their 25GB limit are free to do so, ... READ MORE