Salesforce.com and CVM do supply-chain management in the cloud

Salesforce.com and CVM team up in the cloud
CVM Technology has joined the hip crowd by announcing that its Supplier Central 10 platform is now available on Force.com. CVM handles real-world issues for many firms; you use it to build and maintain your supply chain, so Bob in accounting always has enough pencils, and the widget factory has enough widget ore and coal for the smelters -- that kind of thing.

Fill in supplier central with your suppliers, their information and so on, and the platform returns a shiny, Web 2.0 graphic interface full of graphs and stuff. Now available on the AppExchange, Salesforce.com went out of its way to buff this announcement. Lots of AppExchange apps don't get the royal treatment. That might be because Salesforce.com is desperate to fill in the ranks of software tools that deliver meat and potatoes applications -- not just sales and marketing tools, where it has saturated the market.

Unit4 Agresso successfully launched "accounting in the cloud" on Force.com last year. Salesforce.com partnered with them and turned that into Financialforce.com. There's now an electronic medical records service in the works and Salesforce.com is going after real software developers (sorry Force.com users!) with VMforce.com. And CVM is getting the love from the $1 billion-dollar Software as a Service firm. Is "Inventoryforce.com" in the works too?

Alterian goes with Windows Azure as platform
Customer engagement technology provider Alterian has selected a cloud computing platform for its enterprise marketers. By taking its social media and Web management offerings to Microsoft Windows Azure, Alterian aid it hopes to strike a more global presence by expanding its geographic markets using Azure's flexibility. Alterian CEO David Eldridge says his company already has great software, but can use the leg up.

The move appears to be an attempt to compete more effectively with customer relationship management giant Salesforce.com. But Salesforce.com, the great champion of the cloud, doesn't use cloud services -- it runs its own servers and backends it with moldy old Oracle. Can Alterian make a dent running on Azure?