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Sage's Tuesday announcement of its agreement to buy Intacct prompts a multilayered look at the evolution of the cloud enterprise resource planning space. Both companies are partners with Salesforce and have products based on the Salesforce platform. Each is a member of the AppExchange, and both are situated in the broad cloud ERP space, which has been receiving a lot of attention lately as the market seems to be moving en masse, albeit glacially, to the cloud...

It's hard to believe that the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX could have such reactionary views about artificial intelligence. Elon Musk last weekend had some very un-Musk-like things to say about AI when he addressed the U.S. National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. "AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don't think people fully appreciate that," Musk said. He even suggested that government ought to regulate the nascent industry -- but it's hard to regulate that which isn't yet formed. It's reminiscent of what happened when the George W. Bush administration decided to restrict stem cell research. The regulation didn't work because the research simply moved to more friendly jurisdictions.

People concerned about automation killing jobs might look at Helpshift's strategy and similar automation approaches. By enabling businesses to build help or support into mobile apps, these new models are re-inventing support to get the job done. ...

So much is happening as we approach the end of Q2 -- our industry's busiest quarter, at least by some measures. I'm flying around seeing things but not always able to comment from a middle seat on a red-eye. So this piece is an attempt to catch up and set some markers for the traditionally slower summer ...

FinancialForce held its first big time user conference in Las Vegas last week, headlined by new CEO Tod Nielsen. The company seems to be telling us that it is adjusting course in an effort to create a new category aligned with enterprise resource planning, but very much for this century ...

For several years now, Salesforce has built distinct product lines that all work off the same platform and can integrate in interesting ways. There are product lines for the enterprise, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), business-to-business (B2B) firms and business-to-consumer (B2C) operations -- and probably some others that I haven't considered. For instance, the AppExchange contains a wealth of apps for very specialized types of front-office business, as well as some back-office apps, like accounting...

"It's important to keep up, and by making this announcement, LogMeIn's showing that they belong in the peloton," remarked Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Bold360's strength lies in its interface and ease of use, Constellation's Wang observed. Also, LogMeIn "has a...

While sitting in the audience at Zuora's Subscribed event for customers and partners in San Francisco this week, I couldn't help contemplate the meaning and progress of what was once a set of words that didn't roll off the tongue. I am talking about the "subscription economy" -- and it's really something ...

A lot happens in a decade. Bill Gates once said that we overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10. ...

I don't know why more subscription vendors don't do this. Subscription companies collect mountains of data from their customers, and analyzing the aggregations can deliver profound insights virtually for free. Yet too often subscribers are reluctant to let their data be stripped of identifying characteristics and used for research. Too bad, because there's gold in that big data...

"Recently, inaccurate statement and claims about Kaspersky Lab have circulated in public," the company said in a statement provided to TechNewsWorld by corporate communications manager Denise Bertrand "Eugene never worked for the Russian government," Kapersky Lab contended. "H...

Mobile technology has delivered a lot of useful functionality that enables vendors and their customers to be on the same page more frequently. However, the screen size has an inherent drawback: It shows a very narrow slice of a reality -- typically one idea at a time. The problem is especially acute in the key areas of sales and service ...

"Lack of empathy seems to be a forerunner among cellphone users," suggested Chantale Denis, a clinical social worker and sociologist. "Whether users are addicted or not, cellphone use can perpetuate a lack of accountability, breed irresponsible behavior, feed malevolence, an...

E-commerce brings together several themes that relate to our current fascination with artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), bots, mobile technology and the like. It's actually more than that, because it represents an underserved part of CRM. ...

"Veeva offers CRM for the pharmaceutical industry, which is highly regulated," noted Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. "You have to keep meticulous records," he told CRM Buyer.

CFOs have a new 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner, as if they needed another one. Actually, the really lucky ones who oversee operations in Europe and the U.S. will have two. ASC 606 and IFRS 15 are new accounting rules that describe in great detail how subscription vendors should recognize revenue beginning in December 2018, and we should all care about them...

Salesforce this week announced significant enhancements to its AppExchange Partner Program, including a US$100 million Salesforce Platform Fund to encourage developers of AI-driven solutions, as well as changes to its partner business model. ...

It gives some measure of the importance we give to AI that I went to two conferences last week and sat through two panel sessions on the subject. At CRM Evolution, I was part of the discussion in a breakfast session Paul Greenberg organizes each year. Then I flew to Las Vegas for the Oracle CX show. There executives involved in the adaptive intelligent applications product line tried to define the basics in a session for analysts and reporters...

A few years ago, when Oracle was busy buying companies to fill out its front-office cloud offering, RightNow Technologies developed a "day in the life" video that has stuck with me. It was shown at RightNow's last user meeting as an independent company. In fact, at the conference where it debuted, Oracle announced its acquisition of RightNow ...

They say it can take a product idea 10 years to go from concept to mass-market appeal but that might be only an optimist's viewpoint. Some of the best ideas in CRM right now have been marinating for at least that long -- and some for much longer. Two great examples are analytics and CPQ, which companies like Oracle, Salesforce and others have embraced with passion. Interestingly, each technology has traversed a path that needed other technologies to become fully mature...