By connecting its customer-relationship-management system with social-media monitoring and publishing tools it’s taken on in the past two years, Salesforce.com looks eager to become an advertising and marketing destination. Read more »
To help businesses focus their ad spending on specific social-media users, Salesforce.com is adding the ability to combine existing customer-relationship management lists with social monitoring and publishing tools. Read more »
A startup called Infer has taken on $10 million in venture funding to help more companies get a better idea of which leads to focus on in their sales and marketing lead lists. Read more »
“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 »
Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Remember when the decision to go to Amazon Web Services was all about saving dough? Smart consumers now know that’s not the real reason to move workloads to the cloud. Read more »
Industry giants are adding more development and platform goodies for mobile app developers. This may have the more targeted MBaaS providers a little perplexed. Read more »
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two former Salesforce.com employees who founded AppMesh have developed iPad and iPhone apps salespeople can use to tackle email and track sales deals on the go. Read more »
MuleSoft wants to push its Anypoint Platform as the Switzerland of application integration,and now it has $37 million to promote that vision. Read more »
Blackstone reportedly reached out to Oracle co-prez Mark Hurd to gauge his interest in being Dell CEO should Blackstone’s buyout bid succeed. Here are a few much more interesting options. Read more »
Today’s most successful companies are the ones with the ability to capture and analyze all data available to them. Enter SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, which increase the accessibility of Hadoop and allow organizations to reuse their investment learning in SQL. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Netbreeze promises to bring multi-lingual access and analysis to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube streams via Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Read more »
Salesforce.com recognizes the need to give employees the power to work on the go with mobile devices, and now they can view and share more through the company’s internal Chatter social network. Read more »
Many businesses already get the heebie jeebies when it comes to deploying workloads to the cloud. They have to trust their provider and the metrics it provides. That’s why the Heroku-Rap Genius kerfuffle is important. Read more »
Marc Benioff says SaaS leader will continue to buy companies and technologies — and also build internally — to bolster its marketing and services businesses. Read more »
2008 was about social networking, 2012 about big data and analytics and 2016 could well be about personalization and location, says Michael Slaby, former CIO of Obama for America. Read more »
The latest Salesforce.com effort brings in-app support, chat and co-browsing to users of specified shopping, banking and gaming apps. Read more »
File-share-and-sync vendor Box will announce more enterprise-friendly security features and alliances at the RSA Conference on Monday. Read more »
Optimizing content is crucial as customers migrate from being passive recipients to becoming active contributors. This opportunity presents a fresh set of challenges, not only for those in traditional broadcast industries but also for content managers and enterprise leaders. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Salesforce.com’s Do is morphing into Do More with easy links to Google Drive, Dropbox, Harvest, Wufoo, Contactually and Desk.com Read more »
So you’re building an important application on Heroku’s Platform-as-a-Service but need some help configuring it? Now you can now get that. For a fee. Read more »
As enterprise software companies build their own Box functionality, Box is wooing them to integrate with its own file-share-sync-and collaboration service. Read more »
Tomfoolery aims to make enterprise apps mobile and fun; now it has $1.7 million from Jerry Yang, Brad Garlinghouse and others to get started. 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 »
For its $871 million buyout of Eloqua, Oracle will get more marketing automation expertise and access to more than 1,000 customers. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2013 and continues Oracle’s fourth quarter buying spree. Read more »
The Atlanta-based integrator will use its new funding to keep up with what it calls accelerating demand for cloud applications and to keep serving existing Salesforce.com and Google Apps customers. Read more »
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Startup CipherCloud will use fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and T-Systems to beef up sales and marketing and its global presence, says CEO and founder Pravin Kothari. Read more »
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 »
India’s major tech firms have become competitive enterprise outsourcers and systems integrators on a global scale. Firms such as Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services are looking for technology to provide the next competitive advantages in the market. The cloud provides that opportunity on several levels. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
People love platforms as a service because they are easy so Heroku’s new Fork tool that allows you to copy your database with one click should be a nice feature for users who want to play with their data without making a costly mistake. Read more »
A new $35 million funding round gives inbound marketing SaaS specialist Hubspot the wherewithal to buy companies and hire staff as needed, says company CEO and Co-founder Brian Halligan. It also paves the way to an IPO. Read more »
Encouraged by Workday’s splashy initial public offering, SugarCRM a provider of open-source customer relationship management software-as-a-service, is gearing up for an IPO of its own next year, according to CEO Larry Augustin. It looks like enterprise SaaS is the place to be for IPOs. Read more »
Although older generations might still view cloud computing as an emerging trend, their children take it for granted, largely forgoing physical devices for cloud services. We might as well come get on board and maybe change the world in the process. Read more »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud Sherpas has seen revenue from both its Google Apps and Salesforce.com businesses double in the past year. That seams to indicate that third-party VARs and integrators can make a living off low-cost SaaS applications — and that Google gets that it needs an ecosystem. Read more »
The PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, as well as newer startups. As the market grows, watch for more consolidation, tighter integration with IaaS services, and more features. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
NetSuite, DocuSign, Jive, SugarCRM, Concur and Oracle sign on early to new Box Embed program but with erstwhile Box partners like Salesforce.com and other vendors now doing their own cloud file-share-and-sync, Box does need some reinforcements. Read more »
With more software vendors fielding their own cloud storage capabilities, Box continues to beef up enterprise security and perks for its offering. New features include two-step authentication, company-wide search for admins, and content scanning, the company said. Read more »
