The momentum of VP’s Brand Program continues to grow with the addition of three new partners including Petromark, Inc., Western States Petroleum and Nebraska Iowa Supply, Inc.  The VP retail program continues to resonate with forward-looking distributors who see its game-changing features as the most effective response to the changes currently overtaking the industry.  The savings offered by unbranded supply and lower credit card processing fees coupled with new revenue from VP-branded products have proven compelling to these distributors, along with the opportunity to stand out with the VP Racing Fuels brand and its Mad Scientist icon.

Petromark, Inc. is based in Harrison, Arkansas and services nearly 220 retail and wholesale sites across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee.  In partnering with VP, co-owner Steve Turner “focused on VP’s image, very favorable credit card processing program and incremental revenue from other VP-branded products” in an effort to “provide our independent sites the resources to compete in a changing marketplace.”

By Pete Barlas, Investor’s Business Daily

The cloud computing trend shows no sign of slowing, which is good news for cloud software vendors Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

NetSuite (N)shares are up about 65% since May, while Salesforce.com (CRM) is up about 40% since August.

Both companies are expected to post Q4 revenue growth of about 30% vs. Q4 2011, says Richard Baldry, an analyst for Wunderlich Securities.

Salesforce.com and NetSuite are two of the cloud trend pioneers. AP View Enlarged Image

By Chris Kanaracus

IDG News Service – NetSuite is one of the SaaS (software as a service) market’s pioneers, having sold its growing family of ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-commerce and other applications since 1998. The vendor’s results have been beating Wall Street’s predictions, and may yet again in a few weeks, when NetSuite is expected to announce its fourth-quarter and year-end results.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson spoke with IDG News Service this week on a wide range of topics. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

NetSuite is one of the longest-running players in the SaaS market. That gives you the advantage of maturity, but does it also mean that your core architecture is getting dated? No. The good thing about NetSuite is that we architected it correctly from the start. Multitenancy out of the gate, that was a very important decision. We chose to make it very customizable. Not all SaaS applications are customizable. We put deep customization in the first iteration of the architecture. As time has moved on and our customer profile has changed we’ve had to re-architect some of the subsystems to deal with application performance. Last year we introduced SuiteCommerce. That allowed us to scale up to larger retailers. That was an 18-month re-architecture. I think you’ll see us do a subsystem re-architecture once every 18 months.

Click here to travel to the training page.

To start building your Salesforce and Force.com skills, take advantage of these short online tutorials. These are samples from our full Premier online training catalog, which contains more than 100 titles and is updated monthly. When you’re ready for more, contact your account executive about Premier Success Plans.

Read the article here.

Last year, the cloud continued to be red hot. But keep in mind that the industry is far from young. The roots actually go back to 1998, with the founding of NetSuite (NYSE:N). The company made a big bet that enterprises would eventually access software via the Web.

While NetSuite is far from a startup, the company continues to act like one. Just a year ago, the stock price was at $39.60. Now it’s at $69.20.

So I reached out to NetSuite’s CEO, Zach Nelson, to get his take on the cloud and some of the emerging trends. Here’s what he had to say:

An article on Computerworld discusses the main focus of SalesForce.com Spring 2013 release. Below is a small excerpt, but you can read the full article here to see the rest of the new features and updates in the  release.

“Salesforce.com’s next product update will feature scores of new capabilities for its core CRM (customer relationship management) application as well as the Chatter messaging and collaboration service.

A sandbox preview for the Spring ’13 update is scheduled for Jan. 11, according to a set of release notes posted on Salesforce.com website.

The update will feature a large number of enhancements to Chatter, Salesforce.com’s social collaboration and messaging service, covering areas such as search, content previewing and general usability.”