Soffront Software Inc., launched version 10.0 of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution, with a complete technology upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft .NET, a renewed user interface, and support for easier integration with third-party applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Salesforce.com will acquire the cloud marketing platform ExactTarget. The transaction was valued at approximately $2.5 billion. Salesforce plans to add ExactTarget’s digital marketing capabilities to its Marketing Cloud functionality and to expand its customer base with ExactTarget’s more than 6,000 customers (including Coca-Cola, Gap, and Nike).

To date, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been thriving on its previous acquisitions—Radian6 and Buddy Media—which focus on social marketing. With the new acquisition, Salesforce will be introducing digital marketing to its marketing offering. Read the rest of this entry »

IBM has announced that IBM Watson will be put to work towards improving customer satisfaction, as part of its Smarter Commerce initiative.

The artificially intelligent computer is well known for its ability to win Jeopardy and for its advances in assisting medical institutions. More recently, IBM has decided to exploit Watson for its capacity to learn, adapt, and understand a company’s data rapidly. Customer relationship management is a perfect scenario for testing this ability.

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Coincidentally or not, my industry analyst career started at about the same time that salesforce.com was founded, back in 1999. And boy, has the vocal cloud software company had an amazing transition over the years—once dismissed as a fad-like niche sales force automation (SFA) vendor with glorified contact management capabilities, salesforce.com is now a $3 billion (USD) enterprise software powerhouse. Whether one likes salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff’s bluster or not, the vendor is now indisputably a member of the elite enterprise applications club, joining the likes of SAP, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft Dynamics, Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, and Sage Group. What more poignant example of the “old school” vs. “new school” contrast could be pointed out than the fact that Obama’s 2012 campaign used salesforce.com to monitor voters’ inquiries in real-time in the cloud while Romney’s 2012 campaign used an on-premises Oracle solution (that famously erroneously predicted a landslide victory for the Republicans).
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Salesforce has announced Salesforce Social.com, a product designed for social advertising and meant to enhance Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To date, Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes social listening (Salesforce Radian6), publishing (Salesforce Buddy Media), and social advertising (Social.com). Read the rest of this entry »

ShopIgniter has announced an updated version of its Igniter platform. The solution supports brand advertising to social and mobile consumers, and consequently allows marketers to create, manage, and measure rich social media advertising campaigns.

By using typical social media functions such as search, engage, share, and comment, Igniter attempts to generate business opportunities or leads for its clients. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Convergence 2013, which took place in mid-March 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana, was reportedly the largest annual Convergence conference ever, with more than 11,000 attendees. Although I could not attend the multiday event in person, today’s collaborative technology marvels made it possible for me to follow it fairly closely even from a thousand miles away. Many of the conference messages I first heard at the Microsoft Dynamics’ Fall Analyst Event (FAE) back in November 2012, where the industry analysts and bloggers got conference peek previews (see blog here). Featuring high-profile customers, such as Chobani Inc., Habitat for Humanity International, Revlon Inc., Shock Doctor Inc., and Weight Watchers International Inc., the opening keynote by Microsoft Business Solutions president Kirill Tatarinov talked to how Microsoft Dynamics, as a unifying fabric, is “uniquely positioned in the market to serve as a catalyst to help businesses unite their organizations, unite their people and technology, and unite with their customers.” Read the rest of this entry »

At SugarCon 2013, in New York, SugarCRM demonstrated the new capabilities of its customer engagement platform, Sugar. It features the following developments: Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce the launch of TEC’s first buyer’s guide of 2013: CRM for Medium and Large Enterprises. Download your free PDF copy now.

This buyer’s guide provides in-depth insight from TEC CRM analyst Raluca Druta on a how a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) system can help medium and large enterprises better understand and address their customers’ needs and challenges. With three points of contact with prospects and clients—i.e., sales, marketing, and customer support—such a system presents three different opportunities for positive interactions with and influence on their customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Tracx has announced its new Social Leads product, part of its set of social intelligence tools. The application identifies individuals interested in buying a company’s products by crawling through a variety of social media, community forums, and retail sites, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Amazon, and eBay.

Tracx Social Leads unveils relevant customer conversations as well as what stage of the buying process the customer is at. Read the rest of this entry »

ReachForce, a vendor of business-to-business (B2B) data solutions for marketers, has made public its acquisition of SetLogik, which provides cloud-based data and analytics solutions. ReachForce’s Connected Marketing Data Hub has thus be launched with capabilities such as continuous data quality management and predictive marketing capabilities.

It is well known that lead information can quickly become obsolete, generating frustration among sales reps.  Read the rest of this entry »

The sales and marketing software for small business vendor Infusionsoft has announced at its annual user conference, InfusionCon 2013, the 2013 Spring Release of its product. The version introduces new features that support social engagement, sales productivity, and marketing campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

Soffront Software Inc. has announced the addition of a new scheduling module to its CRM solution. According to the press release, the module has been built with the help of Soffront’s largest service consumers. The product targets commercial cleaning, maintenance, security systems, and guard and armor car services, among other industries. Read the rest of this entry »

Just after having acquired MarketingPilot, Microsoft Dynamics has announced its acquisition of social listening and analytics vendor Netbreeze. Key features of the Netbreeze technology include the ability to identify influencers, buzz analysis, topic analysis, tonality/sentiment analysis, the ability to compare current to historical postings via data archives, and independent adjustment of search configuration.

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 At CeBIT 2013, in Hanover, Germany, SAP made public that its SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application is now powered by the SAP HANA platform. Made available to SAP employees, the solution facilitates real-time access to business-critical data. According to the press release, the migration of a business-critical CRM system to SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA was done in 2.5 months. Thus, SAP itself became the first customer to go live with the new solution. Read the rest of this entry »