Business intelligence is invaluable to businesses of all sizes, and Indicee aims to offer cost-effective products to bring such reporting to everyone.(Though from their intro video, posted below, they seem to be initially targeting smaller companies managing the businesses across multiple applications.) Tapping into productivity software and applications like Excel or Quickbooks, Indicee pulls business data and automatically commences reporting and analysis from the cloud. Their software will also answer business questions with visualizations and reports produced from on-demand data in the cloud. Data can also be shared easily (and securely) with colleagues and associates.

Indicee was recently released to beta testers, and the users include Mary Kay Cosmetics, Alco Ventures, and Sage Software.

This is not the first time Cisco and Salesforce.com have teamed up—their first integration was the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com. The application was available on Force.com, and integrated Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager with Salesforce. The Customer Interaction Cloud will integrate Cisco’s Unified Communications with Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2—this new product is entirely cloud-based, so in many ways it’s a modern version of the prior integration. As an on-demand product, it will eliminate any concerns over hardware, and allow users to focus on delivering customer service.

Customer Interaction Cloud is aimed at businesses with 30 to 300 support representatives, but it may also appeal to larger enterprises that opening new branches, or are in need of quickly deployable support systems.

Since its release last year, Knowledge Driven Support has received Verified v4 status with the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS); every year the non-profit alliance highlights, or “verifies,” those products that it thinks best reflect their best-practice guidelines. Consona KDS is the only product that has achieved such verification for both knowledge and incident management, and aims to help external service and support organizations achieve best-practice objectives through unifying and measuring every agent on every channel.

Knowledge Driven Support will provide multi-channel support integrated with a single knowledgebase with consistent knowledge, automatic delivery of relevant knowledge based on specifics within the case in question, and analytics tracking use of knowledge in certain situations to ultimately pinpoint the causes of customer demand. In addition the official release of KDS will precede new price points and deployment options—namely a cloud-based SaaS option, adding an economical quality to its functionality.

The Adobe Flash Builder will be the new provision for unified development, and will facilitate deployment of Flash applications on Force.com. Because this is an innovation to the Force.com platform, the overarching intention is that the builder be used to extend Salesforce.com CRM applications, but it can also be helpful for creating web sites, and desktop apps that can run outside the browser.

During its three-year tenure, Force.com has garnered some 63,000 customers, who’ve built 120,000 applications. With its Salesforce branding, Force.com attracts plenty of users looking mainly for CRM solutions, but also a fair number looking for non-enterprise solutions. A research analyst at Gartner noted that more and more companies look to Force.com to develop non-CRM applications. This partnership with Adobe Flash certainly gives an added accessibility to building CRM applications, and will thus be an undoubted success.

iLinc’s President and CEO, James Powers, stated that his company’s development strategy centers on working out tangible business problems, so an integration with Salesforce—establishing a real-time connection with CRM—was an obvious solution. The motive behind this particular integration is to get businesses to move webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, and easily and effectively follow up with attendees using Salesforce CRM.

Reviews of iLinc for Salesforce have been positive so far, and as iLinc is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user conference), attendees will learn more about the product during the November convention.

SplendidCRM develops Microsoft-centric CRM solutions for open-source users, so the Azure connection is not entirely surprising. Splendid can be installed to run the database in SQL Azure with the web application running locally, and can also be set to run the database in SQL Azure and the web app in Windows Azure. The goal, of course, is for costumers to cut costs while enjoying increased functionality and quick deployment.

The Microsoft Silverlight 3 Toolkit has also advanced SplendidCRM’s product, as continued incorporation of the environment has recently replaced the previous flash-based and hand-made charts. And the latest incarnation of Splendid’s query engine has been optimized to handle millions of records by employing a custom paging program. Another new search improvement is the added ability to search for duplicate records and merge duplicates into a single record.

SplendidCRM has been tested on all current variations of Windows, and while reviews have not been issued yet, it will be interesting to hear what Windows users think of these new improvements.

The better-than-expected profit and revenue growth can be summed up thus: $3.1 billion third quarter net income, or $2.40 per share. These numbers are down from a year ago, but Wall Street had projected earnings of $2.38 a share for this year. This ups IBM’s earnings for the year, as they are now expected to close 2009 at $9.85 a share.

Company CFO Mark Loughridge says they gained market share in both software and hardware, but their hardware growth is not doing as well as in previous years, with their mainframe server revenue down 26% from a year ago. Global business services numbers were also down from last year, but still represent a relative success with $4.34 billion in revenue. And though Loughridge was not forthcoming with details, he expressed confidence in corporate demand stabilizing in the next year, and IBM’s future (multiple) opportunities.

Service Cloud 2 and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center—which helps companies smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice call with Internet applications—are integrated by a connector, allowing customers to use Salesforce CRM as their primary agent desktop while having access to Contact Center’s capabilities. The solution is for companies with 30 to 300 customer service representatives, and features the Customer Interaction Cloud, a tool providing more efficient communications.

Salesforce and Cisco consider this new integration the answer to growing demands for cloud-based customer service solutions within the SMB market, as well as a new model for customer service. The cloud model allows companies to deliver “the expertise of the community” to their customers, and Salesforce reports that some 8,000 customers have already turned to Service Cloud 2 (launched earlier this fall) for their customer service needs.

The site considers itself a rally cry of “the new computing era,” positioned at the center of this shift within business IT. They encourage enterprises to empower themselves by learning, keeping current, and debating the trend. NoMoreServers will be edited by hosting expert and recent Rackspace addition Andy Schroepfer, and will feature articles and daily commentary about hosting, cloud computing, and key vendors like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, as well as a forum for discussions.

Rackspace is based in San Antonio, Tex., and provides hosting for about 70,000 businesses, and more than 51,000 of those are cloud computing businesses. And they are pretty intent on propelling enterprise into modernity, recently partnering with blogger Robert Scoble to launch Building 43, which encourages businesses to use modern technology and social media for increased productivity.

Salesforce and Dell have been testing the solution within their respective companies: Salesforce runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment, and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with their on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Integration Services. For Salesforce, this collaboration with Dell is a means of extending the adoption of cloud computing services, as it gives smaller businesses the obvious cloud-computing benefit of managing customer relations without the cost of managing infrastructure while utilizing pre-existing hardware.

Businesses with multipart IT systems will benefit from Dell Integration Services, which provides inexpensive and fast integration and migration for businesses using Salesforce’s cloud. Dell will more or less be reselling the stable of Salesforce.com products—from the Contact Manager to the Enterprise Edition—and offering the integration services.