Stories about: Salesforce.com

Adobe Systems, whose roots are in the media and publishing industries, is pushing deeper into the enterprise by promoting its Flash platform as a way to improve the stodgy user interfaces that come with most business applications.

In five years, Microsoft expects half of all enterprise employees with e-mail to use a combined online and premises-based system like the company's Exchange Online, an executive said Monday at a launch event for that software and the SharePoint Online hosted collaboration application.

Adobe Systems has released a public beta of CoCoMo, a hosted service that developers can use to add video conferencing, voice-over-IP and other collaboration features to applications built with its Flex developer tools.

During his keynote speech at the Society for Information Management's SIMposium 08 conference in the US, author Nicholas Carr drew an analogy between cloud computing and the transition that manufacturers made from generating their own power to relying on utilities in the early 20th century.

The auto industry has been offering US lawmakers an apocalypse-level scenario warning them that as many as three million jobs could disappear if automakers run out of cash.

Telstra launched the first stage of its online software platform this week, rolling out security, email, CRM, business productivity and backup solutions via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Salesforce.com moved deeper into the world of cloud computing on Monday, announcing partnerships that link its Force.com hosted applications platform with services from Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

When the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.

Mobile applications for specific business needs can offer a wide range of benefits for users: access to internal databases and server-based applications (anything from sales and product management tools to patient information systems) as well as custom tools such as loan calculators or internal process guides. Providing these types of tools on a mobile device means workers can access resources and perform job functions on the road or while meeting with clients with little more than a carrier's mobile data service.

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment -- Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL -- under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has officially filled the shoes previously worn by founder and Chairman Bill Gates, stepping in as leader of the company's vast developer network, which is its lifeblood and crucial to the enormous success of Windows. Ozzie delivered Monday's keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, introducing Windows Azure, a cloud-computing development and hosting environment that integrates Ozzie's vision for the future of the Web, which he began building at his company Groove Networks before he joined Microsoft.