CRM Battle Heats Up

Next week, Salesforce.com is expected to unveil a pact with Dell Computer under which Salesforce.com's hosted CRM service will be promoted on Dell's small-business solutions Web site. The associated CRM services will be hosted by Salesforce.com on Dell's PowerEdge servers running Linux, sources said.

Meanwhile, NetLedger is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard to offer hosted business applications to the same audience. Under the terms of that deal, both companies will ensure integration of NetLedger's business applications and HP Tablet PCs, said Zach Nelson, president and CEO of NetLedger, San Mateo, Calif. Hosted back-office processing will run on HP ProLiant servers, and HP will handle leasing arrangements for interested customers, Nelson said.

The applications, which run from $50 to $75 per user, per month, will enable small businesses to buy and use as much accounting, customer support, inventory management, order processing, payroll and sales functionality as they need.

NetLedger and HP plan to offer the solution direct and through solution providers, including current NetSuite and Oracle resellers, NetLedger said. HP resellers also can enroll in NetLedger's solution provider program.

In related news, NetLedger on Wednesday said it is adding commissions management capability to its NetSuite and NetCRM business suites. With this automated calculation functionality, salespeople can use a custom dashboard to show how much they're making or how much they will make. "For salespeople, the two most important things are doing the deal and getting paid--though not necessarily in that order," Nelson said.

The commissions feature will be rolled into the suites sometime in August, he said.

Meanwhile, Oracle earlier this week said it plans to enhance its CRM marketing applications by boosting the realtime data analysis features that are tailored for general business users, not statisticians or specialists, said Oracle executives.

The vendor has also fine-tuned Oracle Scripting to make it easier to "close E the loop," for example, between a company's call center and marketing initiatives. "You can build a script that's tied to a marketing program, so if [someone who] gets a mailer from Oracle with an 800 number [makes the call, the representative] will have all the information we have about the caller," said Robb Ecklund, vice president of CRM product marketing at Oracle.

Also, new versioning capability has been added to the application's content manager, and that will track translations for global brochures, Ecklund said.

Given that Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison owns more than half of NetLedger and Oracle's own applications are making a foray into NetLedger's SMB market, Ecklund admitted the two companies do an "interesting dance." Oracle itself hosts its applications for customers, although they tend to be larger companies, observers said.