Like a car, an in-house CRM application will get you to the same destination as a hosted application.

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However, many applications in London were externally hosted and one application (torch relay nominations) was based on a true public cloud offering from a major vendor.

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Marc Benioff all but educated the market on the benefits of software-as-a-service, the advantages of using a lightweight, easily configurable hosted sales force application compared to the generally accepted status quo of the time: complex enterprise software typified by Siebel, now an Oracle acquisition.

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Because once a client signs up for a hosted CRM or accounting application and begins paying their monthly fees, I get a small piece of that long term revenue stream.

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MLB.com offers fans the most complete baseball information and interactivity on the web, including up-to-date statistics, game previews and summaries, extensive historical information, online ticket sales, baseball merchandise, authenticated memorabilia and collectibles, fantasy games, live full-game video streaming and in-progress and on-demand highlights, live and archived audio broadcasts of every game, Gameday pitch-by-pitch application, around-the-clock hosted and specialty video programming, complete blogging capabilities and the award-winning suite of At Bat mobile applications.

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They offer several different approaches to integrating collaborative capabilities into the IT infrastructure: standalone on-premise application platforms, remote or cloud-based hosted applications, components that integrate directly into other enterprise tools or those that integrate into enterprise portals and web sites.

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Our email is, of course, hosted, so everyone can access their messages using whatever email application they like straight through their browsers.

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