Archive

Salesforce last week unveiled the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, billing it as the fastest path to unified commerce. It's built on technology from Demandware; Salesforce completed its acquisition of the company this summer. Commerce Cloud enables brands to provide personalized experiences for shoppers a...

Salesforce has agreed to acquire its Marketing Cloud partner Krux, which offers a data management platform. Salesforce will pay $340 million in cash and issue between 3.4 million and six million shares of common stock to consummate the deal, according to documentation filed with the U.S. Securities ...

Something tells me that if Salesforce already leaked news about its new AI product, Einstein, that it might not be the biggest news that will emerge from Dreamforce next week. However, I also think Einstein will be involved in whatever is the big takeaway. Salesforce has become rather large, with $8...

Larry Ellison was having too much fun. In his second keynote of this year's Oracle OpenWorld user conference, he was talking about his company's database, Oracle 12c, and comparing it highly favorably to Amazon's competing databases. It seems Ellison always has fun, which is one likely reason that t...

"I dare you to find a sales person or account manager who enjoys spending the last 45 minutes of the day inputting data into the CRM system," said Bullhorn CMO Gordon Burnes. "A lot of companies are facing the CRM adoption challenge. Why is it that this account record doesn't have much data in it? W...

Automation has a habit of killing jobs, which has been true since the Industrial Revolution. However, it seems that we're discovering this truth all over again. We easily forget when we focus only on the job-creation aspects of automation, and that usually gets us in trouble. Since the IR, there hav...

Anyone who works with sales people knows that their ultimate incentive is their commission check. Since the first time that "sales" was identified as a profession, we've been paying the people who sell based primarily on their results. This has worked well -- but things are starting to change. The d...

Sunday's Oracle OpenWorld keynotes were good -- especially when compared with prior years -- but they still suffered from the perennial problem of trying to stuff too much content into a two-hour event. Diane Bryant, SVP at Intel and a big Oracle partner, spent an hour covering a very broad landscap...

Oracle is flying high as it goes into its annual Oracle OpenWorld customer conference, based on the news from its earnings call on Thursday. It's clear that the company has succeeded in pivoting from on-premises to cloud software offerings. The revenue acceleration from cloud products and services s...

Just two months after announcing the integration of its CRM and ERP platform under the Microsoft Dynamics 365 umbrella, Microsoft this week announced a six-year agreement to deploy the service to HP Inc.'s ranks. Under the agreement, HP will deploy the Microsoft Dynamics platform -- including Azure,...

A common perception of business agility is that it revolves around quickness, especially quickness in the service of accelerating a deal or transaction. That's a good starting point, but agility actually goes deeper -- especially now that so many structural changes, like cloud computing and subscrip...

Why do companies invest in CRM, sales performance management software, business intelligence, and every other component of the customer-facing technology stack? The obvious response is ROI. CRM paid back $8.71 for every dollar invested in it, Nucleus Research reported way back in 2014. Business anal...

Salesforce isn't waiting for Dreamforce to begin the drumbeat over its artificial intelligence offering which is -- or will be -- called "Einstein." There is so much to discuss about this turn of events that it's hard to begin, so rather than starting at a conventional jumping-off point I'll start w...

It's surprising how much inaccurate data lives in many CRM systems, observed Eric Esfahanian, SVP of Gryphon Networks. "CRM is naturally a good source for analytics and sales intelligence if the data that lives within your CRM is automated, accurate, and something that you can reliably make decision...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday released its August complaint snapshot, which indicates that consumers across the country have been filing a large number of complaints about access to banking services. Further, many consumers complained that when they tried to open new accounts, ...