CRM vendor RightNow announced a new SaaS (software as a service) pricing and licensing model on Thursday that it says provides customers with fairer, clearer deals. The company also issued a "Cloud Challenge" to competitors, urging them to adopt similar principles.

Sybase and SAP on Tuesday released the long-awaited first fruits of the mobile partnership they announced about a year ago.

There isn't a sales force in the world that says it has enough Leads. And you won't find many marketing VPs who want to do fewer campaigns. So there's a never-ending stream of new leads, prospect interactions, and conversations to be stored in the CRM system. At companies in consumer markets, open source software, and other categories it's not unusual to find a million leads or more. But that's just the beginning: if you're using the latest marketing automation system, every e-mail, web download, and prospect response is recorded in the CRM system. And if you have a large call center, every call and e-mail exchange should be recorded well.

At the core of customer relationship management is "who am I talking with?" In a simple SFA or CRM system, it's obvious: you called them, or they called you. But in Enterprise CRM, it's tricky to identify exactly whom the interaction is with, and every new data source seems to make it harder. Last week, we dealt with the blurring of contact information from multiple contact lists. This week, we're dealing with avatar confusion from multiple entry points into your company's web and social networking sites.

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced a private beta program for Chatter, the enterprise collaboration platform first announced last year, positioning it as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes.

Oracle has its heart set on dominating the social services software market, in which its rival SAP has historically had a strong hand.

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