Few companies today have the time or the analytics expertise to apply statistics and complex data modeling to regular or even daily business decisions and operations. Now, however, an ecosystem of companies is emerging to fill this need. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Content owners, whether they are publishers, retailers, or marketers, are always looking for new ways to deliver a unique experience to their customers. We call this content personalization. Key trends in this area are led by a collection of technologies that we call post-programming curation. These technologies use the best of behavioral tracking, collaborative filtering, audience targeting, and dynamic content presentation. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much. Those optimistic about […] Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The latest Salesforce.com effort brings in-app support, chat and co-browsing to users of specified shopping, banking and gaming apps. Read more »
Dexplora, the co-founders of which were also behind The Astonishing Tribe, is about to launch an iPhone app to make salespeople actually want to use the CRM systems they’re supposed to use. Read more »
The task-management market is growing, in part because users need to coordinate with teams via mobile. In this case, heavier-weight solutions like Yammer, IBM Connections, and Podio don’t always suffice. But the demand for digital to-do lists that can be shared across project teams is increasing. Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This shift in WAN requirements is placing increased cost and performance pressure on traditional WAN solutions, which either pose the exorbitant costs of private WAN services or are burdened by the unreliability of the public internet. WAN optimization and virtualization can address and improve this in enterprises. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Data is a hot topic among the startup community, which is why stealthy startup RelateIQ has a bunch of people excited about its product and plans. The startup has some big data street cred with executives from Palantir and LinkedIn’s former data scientist DJ Patil involved. Read more »
While cloud, mobility, social, and analytics have been driving demand for IT products and services in 2012, the worldwide IT spending picture has become dimmer as the year has progressed: We’re looking at 5.1 percent worldwide IT spending growth in 2012. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
After acquiring productivity app Manymoon and relaunching it as Do last year, Salesforce.com is announcing that it is rolling out new contacts and deal flow management features to make Do more of a work collaboration platform for everyone from individual consumers to teams within big corporations. Read more »
Salesforce is reportedly close to buying social media marketing platform Buddy Media for $800 million. If true, it shows how Salesforce is adapting to the changing face of customer relationship management, which is increasingly about managing branding, social media interactions and marketing for customers. Read more »
Daylite 4, the Mac and iOS CRM solution from Marketcircle, gets its first major redesign in a long time. Daylite has a decade-long history with the Mac, and has some very welcome improvements in this new version, but a lot of polishing to do too. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Enterprises realize their big data is a strategic asset, and they have budget to spend against it. But without the usual yardsticks and metrics for measuring the success, these projects will fall flat. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Los Angeles-based startup Causecast this week debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering employees ways to give back. Read more »
The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics software will be offered as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. As Red Hat, Microsoft, Heroku, and Cloud Foundry PaaSes compete, watch for them to add more services and capabilities just as they’ve raced to add language support. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Oracle’s planned acquisition of RightNow Technologies gives the enterprise apps giant a bigger presence in SMB accounts and helps populate its planned public cloud with applications more quickly. Oracle is paying $43 a share, or roughly $1.5 billion for the SaaS company. Read more »
Online CRM pioneer Salesforce.com continues to back up its ecosystem with its checkbook, this time with an investment in cloud storage provider Box.net. In the past few months, Salesforce.com has made a series of outright acquisitions of Assistly, Radian6, and Heroku. Read more »
San Francisco-based start up Xobni has been trying to improve the Outlook and Blackberry email experience for a while now, but today they’re launching their latest contact management platform and related products for Gmail and Android under the brand name Smartr. Read more »
AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog, has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding and hints at a future supporting languages beyond PHP. Read more »
Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise solution for Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM) that includes interconnected internal and external social networks, which allow customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly, for customer support, idea management, and other customer engagement needs. Read more »
Xobni, a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that automatically displays additional information about email contacts, has announced that it is making available “gadgets,” third-party additions to Xobni that will let well-known collaboration tools like Yammer, Chatter and Dropbox become an integral part of the Outlook interface. Read more »
Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Canadian social-media monitoring company Radian6 for a total of $326 million in cash and stock, and says that it will make the company’s tools and services a core part of its Sales Cloud customer-relationship management dashboard for businesses. Read more »
Cloud CRM provider Salesforce has announced the acquisition of web conferencing and meeting tools provider Dimdim. Salesforce says that it will use Dimdim’s presence and on-demand meeting and collaboration technologies and development team to add new real-time communication capabilities to its Chatter collaboration platform. Read more »
The basic idea of Gist is to harness information, filtered for relevance, based on your connections. So who you know informs the data that is intelligently presented to you in an email digest, on a dashboard on the Gist website and via iPhone or Android device. Read more »
We’re all being inundated with information; tools that help us filter that mass of data can be useful — those that filter well can become indispensable. Workstreamer is a “social CRM” tool that can help you to monitor your customers, prospects, vendors and your own company. Read more »
PBworks today released a Customer Relationship Edition of its enterprise collaboration software. Unlike most existing CRM apps, which are primarily reporting and management tools, PBworks’ new app is is designed to be used at all stages the sales cycle for external collaboration with prospects and customers. Read more »
I’m often asked to help new businesses get set up with the software tools they’ll need to be successful — from financial programs, to CRM systems, to project management, and so on. Soho OS aims to provide all of these services, and more, in one place. Read more »
At first glance, 5050biz.com looks a lot like LinkedIn. So I asked the folks at 5050biz the obvious question: if I’m already on LinkedIn, as a lot of web workers are, what does 5050biz have to offer me? Read more »
In “The Power of Who: You Already Know Everyone You Need to Know,” author Bob Beaudine attests that we already know everyone we need to know to succeed. I’m coming to believe that more and more the longer I’m in business. Read more »
In President Obama’s budget announced yesterday, the feds may have opened a window of opportunity for cloud computing companies large and small hoping for some government largess. The federal budget hopes to increase spending on IT in 2011 by 1.2 percent to $79.4 billion. Read more »
By the middle of this year I expect we’ll have a big selection of e-book readers to choose from. There were dozens of readers on display at the CES 2010 this month, and it seems that every gadget maker is working on one for the market. […] Read more »
Arguably, Zoho is a competitor of Google’s, since both include web-based document creation and editing tools among their product offerings. That hasn’t stopped Zoho from offering integration with Google products in the past, and today it introduces full Google Docs compatibility, a move which shows it […] Read more »
Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise collaboration offerings from Cisco and Microsoft, which […] Read more »
