Enterprise Apps

OPINION

Top CRM Blogs of 2016: Countdown, Part 2

There's something to be said for consistency. Baseball Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn hit over .300 19 years in a row. The swallows have returned to Mission San Juan Capistrano every year since 1812. Richard Belzer played Detective John Munch in nine different television series over 23 years. Doing things...

INSIGHTS

Oracle's Important Little Acquisition

Oracle has announced the acquisition of Apiary, a small company that tucks into its product line and will not make much of a splash in the financial pages or in tech circles. Nonetheless, it's important strategic news. The value of the deal wasn't publicized -- but the dollars likely would get lost ...

Pipedrive, a CRM manager that targets the end-user salesperson, has raised $17 million in a round of Series B funding from an investor group led by Atomico. Two of the company's original investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Rembrandt Ventures, participated in the new round as well. Pipedrive int...

INSIGHTS

Adaptive Intelligent Applications

At OpenWorld, Oracle jumped into the AI and machine learning space for its CX products, aka CRM, and other applications, like HCM, with an interesting difference -- a huge data store to help educate the algorithms that work for you. Machine learning depends on data about prior situations that the le...

Clarabridge, which offers SaaS and on-premises software products designed to help companies improve their customer experience management, on Tuesday announced a full-service solution for retail banking. Clarabridge's solutions use sentiment and text analytics to enable automatic collection, categori...

OPINION

Top CRM Blogs of 2016: Countdown, Part 1

In a year when it seemed that CRM continued to blur into other technologies -- artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, analytics, predictive tools -- there was no shortage of things to blog about. However, only a few bloggers really captured what was going on in CRM in 2016 and reflected th...

INSIGHTS

Oracle's Cloud Strategy: A Fine Balance

Oracle recently held a call for analysts to discuss its results for the last quarter, and there were multiple bright spots. It was much like a similar call 90 days previous, and together the calls drove home the conclusion that Oracle is turning into a cloud company. A casual observer might not be c...

Cloud-based ERP firm FinancialForce on Friday named a new CEO, Tod Nielsen, who previously served as executive vice president of platform at Salesforce. Nielsen takes the helm from FinancialForce founder Jeremy Roche, who remains a major shareholder in the company. He will stay on as special advisor...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Engagio CEO Jon Miller: How to Land a Whale

"Traditional demand-based, lead-based marketing is like fishing with a net," said Engagio CEO Jon Miller. "You run campaigns and marketing programs, and stuff comes out the other end. What the account-based world is all about is that you have a list of names, but you don't wait around to see if thos...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Radius CEO Darian Shirazi: Solve for Data Decay

"One of the interesting things about CRM and marketing automation is that most of these systems have poor data quality," said Radius CEO Darian Shirazi. "Typically, customers buy data lists or get inbound leads, and the information associated with those accounts, opportunities and leads ends up deca...

Artificial intelligence will revolutionize marketing in the next five years, according to survey results Demandbase released this week. Eighty percent of the 500 B2B marketers who participated in the online poll, conducted last month by Wakefield Research, said they expected an AI-fueled marketing r...

INSIGHTS

Looking Forward

Traditionally in this year-end piece, I peer into my cloudy crystal ball and forecast the year ahead in CRM. Sometimes I'm close, other times not, but either way, my predictions quickly are forgotten. This year, I've decided just to say what I want rather than what realistically might happen. Since ...

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Aptean SVP Matt Keenan: CRM Needs to Be Intuitive

There are three significant trends in CRM right now, according to Matt Keenan, SVP of Aptean's product group. "The first is the rapid evolution of human-system interaction. Gone are the days of sitting in front of a laptop and interacting with CRM. Customers are looking for multiple channels. The wa...

INSIGHTS

Qualitative Data - the Other Stuff

We've become obsessed with big data and analyzing it, though sometimes I think we get in our own way. The issue is that we preferentially collect quantitative data as if it were the only thing worth the time. In fact, quantitative data is but one kind of data, and the information it provides gives a...

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