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The article reports that the computer software developer SAP America Inc. has merged its North American and Latin American business units to increase sales and market share. This decision was taken by SAP on seeing the fourth quarter results that have shown increased software revenues for the company. It was recently announced by the company that it had combined the two businesses to create one new unit called SAP Americas. The new group will be led by Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP America. The United States, Canada, Central and South America and the Caribbean will be included in SAP Americas. The company officials stated that SAP has more than 5,000 customers in the Americas. Apart from focusing more on geographic regions, SAP is also increasing its presence in the mid-market with a boatload of new partner offerings.

Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp. has launched IBM Application Hosting in partnership with Onyx Software Corp. IBM Application Hosting is a hosted CRM offering based on Onyx's Onyx Enterprise CRM suite and managed by IBM Global Services.IBM Application Hosting for Onyx is implemented within 30days and accessed through a Web browser, using a multitenantedapproach similar to hosted CRM services from Salesforce.com,UpShot Corp., Salesnet Inc. and NetLedger Inc. IBM also launched its service IBM Services Anywhere Select which enables medium-size business customers to have IBM manage the components of their infrastructure, including storage, application support and security, saving internal IT resources for other projects. Separately, San Francisco, California-based Salesforce.com announced in March 2003 that it supports deeper, bidirectional integration between its service and the Outlook mail client. Previously, Salesforce.com users could only sync their Outlook calendar and task lists with the Salesforce.com service.