Salesforce News & Articles

Oracle is on the acquisition path again, just a few weeks after it closed the RightNow deal. This time Oracle is adding to its public cloud by purchasing talent management solution provider Taleo for a price of US$ 1.9 billion.

CRM is nothing really unless it can adapt to business users’ changing marketplace. Microsoft, since the release of Dynamics CRM online last year, committed itself to providing agile CRM and preparing companies for the release by flagging changes 90 days in advance. It has now flagged that it is making Dynamics CRM mobile.

Nimble, Flotype and Lithium Technologies kicked off 2012 with funding ranging from US$ 1 million up to US$ 53.4 million.

SpringCM has been busy again after offering free document management functionality last week to its VIP cloud content platform. This week, it has integrated Salesforce Chatter so users are kept up-to-date through Chatter when objects are added, or updated, in SpringCM.

Salesforce has a problem. Nope, not the title of a new Joseph Heller novel, but the results of internal research carried out by SpringCM of Salesforce customers and corroborated by a further informal survey carried out at Dreamforce 2011 or Cloudforce NYC in November.

The first major release based around the Salesforce acquisition of Radian6 has been unveiled and extends social enterprise marketing with the addition of features for social monitoring, insights, engagement, workflow and websites.

Technology research company Nucleus just released its bi-annual assessment of CRM applications and probably unsurprisingly, named Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com the leading vendors in the space.

Gartner has updated its magic quadrant for horizontal portals and there are some notable changes from the previous version. Much of the change is related to organizations embracing Enterprise 2.0 concepts in an attempt to deepen user engagement. This signals the first expansion in a long time of the number of platform options as vendors strive to meet the demands of enterprises seeking new innovative solutions.

Busy week again in the document management space. This time Fujitsu takes the limelight with its new scanning to iPhone and iPad functionality not to mention Chatter and Google Docs, Nuxeo previewed v5.5, while EntropySoft upgraded Content Hub. Perceptive and AssureSign have also signed a partnership agreement.

Box.net is gearing up to take on bigger players in the enterprise software market. Having recently raised US$ 48 million earlier this year, the cloud storage platform startup has recently updated this Series D financing round with US$ 81 million from Salesforce.com and SAP, with Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA contributing to the round.

Not content to rest on its laurels after its Dreamforce conference earlier this month, Salesforce has announced it has acquired Assistly, a customer service help desk that engages with users in real time over a range of channels, including social media, from one interface.

KnowledgeTree joins the list of companies that are now providing analytics to help existing and future companies deal with the massive mountain of data that is entering their repositories daily. Its release today of analytics offerings, along with some smart tools, should extend its reach and add another market differentiator.

Salesforce.com announced some pretty significant updates to Chatter at this year's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The highlights include support for customer groups, realtime chat, and enhanced integration capabilities. 

Earlier in the week, Microsoft talked up a storm about its Dynamics CRM Online as well as cash incentives to take it up. But the tough talk was only part of a wider piece from Microsoft about its cloud strategy. Could it be that Microsoft is finally nailing down the nuts and bolts of what it wants to do in the cloud?

Lots of news is coming out of this year's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Pardot's personal addition, revealed today, gives a social networking boost to the company's already well-developed marketing automation system.