On-demand work suite

It"s been nearly a year since Dave Duffield unveiled his on-demand enterprise applications company Workday, with the launch of his Workday Human Capital Management software. And since that time, Duffield and Co. have been toiling away to build out the rest of his on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) vision. The PeopleSoft founder has added another piece to his project. A beta version of Workday Financials was released Monday. The software includes core accounting features such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and financial accounting and reporting. ***

Is there room for more than one Salesforce.com? Michael Gregoire sure hopes so, and he's not alone. Gregoire, a former PeopleSoft executive, recently took the helm at San Francisco start-up Taleo. It's one of a few dozen software start-ups emulating Salesforce, which is shaking up the $10 billion market for customer relationship management, or CRM, software and threatening industry leader Siebel Systems with a groundbreaking business model. Salesforce's software programs require no installation because the company delivers them as Web pages over the Internet. Salesforce also charges monthly subscription fees for its service instead of requiring traditional licensing agreements that include big starting fees--agreements businesses find increasingly cumbersome. ***