Yoking cognitive computing with customer service, IBM has launched a system that can reference large amounts of unstructured data to help companies better field customer phone calls.

Salesforce.com's upcoming Summer '13 release of its cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) software will feature a slew of enhancements to the Chatter social collaboration tool as well as many improvements that are the result of customer suggestions, according to a set of official release notes.

Global CRM (customer relationship management) revenue grew 12.5 percent last year to US$18 billion, a rate three times that of all enterprise software segments on average, as companies look to acquire more business and serve existing customers better, according to a new Gartner report.

Salesforce.com, a pillow manufacturer and an employee of the pillow maker are caught up in a complex three-way legal battle, with a US$125,000 American Express bill and an allegedly failed software implementation at the center of the dispute.

Salesforce.com is taking steps to combine its acquisitions in social media monitoring and social advertising with its core CRM (customer relationship management) software through a new product called Social.com.

A growing interest in big data, analytics, and cloud computing helped propel a weak software enterprise market last year, according to research from IDC. SAP and Oracle fared the best among the large software vendors.

Infor is hoping a new social collaboration tool, updated middleware and user interfaces, as well as options for cloud-based deployments, will help cement its place as one of the industry's largest ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors after SAP and Oracle.

Salesforce.com is giving customers and partners access to a new set of tools and services for building mobile applications on its cloud platform.

Cloud-based marketing automation vendor Marketo's plans to raise up to $75 million in an initial public offering, which were revealed this week, could influence larger companies to acquire the company, including Salesforce.com and SAP.

Oracle surprised many tech industry observers by announcing Thursday it would pay US$871 million for marketing automation software vendor Eloqua. The move seemed a bit unlikely given the amount of sales and marketing software Oracle already had.