Katherine Noyes
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Katherine Noyes
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Microsoft’s Nadella sets lofty cloud goals
Less than a week after reporting that Microsoft’s enterprise cloud business is currently on an annual run rate of US$6.3 billion, CEO Satya Nadella says the company’s goal is to increase that figure to $20 billion by fiscal year 2018.“That’s the cloud that we want to build,” he said Wednesday at the company’s briefing for financial analysts during its Build conference in San Francisco. “It’s leading with some of our SaaS applications and having the IaaS, PaaS capability and our servers, which are the edge of our cloud. That’s our vision. That’s why we believe that we get to participate in future growth.”Run rate is simply quarterly revenue presented on an annualized basis. Microsoft’s cloud business includes its Azure platform and cloud versions of Office 365 and Dynamics CRM.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Who’s courting Salesforce? IBM, Oracle among top guesses
A report that Salesforce.com is entertaining takeover offers whipped up a storm of speculation Wednesday, as analysts and other observers mulled the possibility and what it could mean for the enterprise software market.“It would require a massive deal for that to happen,” noted Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst with Constellation Research. “Salesforce still has a lot of growth ahead.”Spurred by the approach of a potential acquirer, Salesforce has hired financial advisers to help it field such offers, according to the Bloomberg To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Who’s courting Salesforce? IBM, Oracle among top guesses
A report that Salesforce.com is entertaining takeover offers whipped up a storm of speculation Wednesday, as analysts and other observers mulled the possibility and what it could mean for the enterprise software market. “It would require a massive deal for that to happen,” noted Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst with Constellation Research. “Salesforce still has a lot of growth ahead.” Spurred by the approach of a potential acquirer, Salesforce has hired financial advisers to help it field such offers, according to the Bloomberg report, which was based on anonymous sources. The company’s stock closed up 11.6 percent on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, giving it a market capitalization just north of US$47 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Adobe Marketing Cloud gets a CRM boost with Microsoft Dynamics integration
While marketers want to engage customers in a unified way, disconnected systems often make that difficult. Adobe and Microsoft aim to tackle that problem by integrating Adobe’s Marketing Cloud with Dynamics CRM.The goal of the integration, announced Wednesday at Adobe Summit in London, is to let companies execute marketing strategies that take all customer engagements into account, from reach and acquisition to retention and loyalty.Microsoft Dynamics Marketing complements Adobe’s Marketing Cloud with capabilities including marketing-resource management. With the new integration, companies get a combined tool for both customer relationship management and marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Xerox targets paper-laden enterprises with new mobile apps, services
The “paperless office” has long been held up as a goal for businesses large and small, but few have come even close. The average office worker, in fact, still generates roughly two pounds of paper waste every day, according to the U.S. EPA.Aiming to help cut a few more of the ties that bind businesses to paper, Xerox on Tuesday unveiled a raft of new automation services and mobile apps for enterprise users.Xerox’s Workflow Automation Solution for Supply Chain Optimization tool, for example, targets retailers with a new way to digitize, centralize, automate and govern the manual steps involved in the product life cycle. Using the Datawatch Managed Analytics Platform, the new offering can reduce labor and printing costs, Xerox says, as well as simplify inventory and invoice reconciliation and improve fill rates by syncing data and applying automated analytics at the store level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Can gamification solve enterprises’ engagement problem?
If 90 percent of the world’s workforce were suddenly struck with a debilitating illness that rendered them unable to perform to their fullest potential, it would be declared a global crisis.In enterprises, that statistic is more or less the norm.Just 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs, a recent Gallup report found—meaning that they’re “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.”The remaining 87 percent? Not so much. They’re either “not engaged or indifferent—or even worse, actively disengaged and potentially hostile—to their organizations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce for HR puts the focus on mobile and social capabilities
If there are any overriding trends at work in the enterprise-software market today, consumerization and mobile would have to be among the biggest. Vendors large and small have been racing to add such features to their products, and Thursday brought a fresh example: Salesforce for HR, a new tool that aims to give employees a personalized experience via mobile and social capabilities.Built on a foundation of cloud, social, mobile and data-science technologies, Salesforce for HR taps Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform and is designed to complement existing HR-focused systems with a number of tools designed to help companies and employees connect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Great customer experience is an elusive goal
Every company says it wants to provide a top-notch customer experience; how many actually do is another matter.To wit: Although improving the customer experience is a strategic priority at a full 73 percent of businesses surveyed for a new Forrester Research report released Monday, only 1 percent of companies currently deliver an excellent experience, the study found.That’s a problem, Forrester says, because customer experience (sometimes called CX) has become a more strategic imperative than ever.“Growth is now the top priority for business leaders, and to achieve that you have to improve customer experience,” said Kyle McNabb, a vice president of research strategy with Forrester. “Traditionally we’ve all worked toward metrics like ROI, but now the metric is impact on experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Are you ready for Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ on Tuesday?
Google said in February that it was going to make mobile-friendliness matter more to its search-engine rankings. On Tuesday, it makes good on that commitment—and webmasters who didn’t heed the warning may see a steep drop in traffic.It’s a shift so potentially fraught with peril for those who aren’t ready that it’s being called “Mobilegeddon.” Essentially, Google is expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal when it compiles search results. Sites that are mobile-friendly will be ranked higher in search results; those that aren’t will suffer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Don’t look now, but ATMs are about to get a cloud makeover
Automated teller machines have been around for decades, but surprisingly few changes have been made to the technologies that run them. That’s about to change.NCR on Wednesday rolled out new software that will transform ATMs to use the cloud with Android and a thin-client model of computing. The result, it says, will be a big boost in security as well as dramatically lower costs.Most of the world’s 2.2 million or so ATMs today are essentially thick-client PCs, and the vast majority of them—as much as 75 percent—run Windows XP, NCR says. It’s perhaps no wonder that security is an issue, yet banks typically must still administer updates manually to each ATM in their network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Don’t look now, but ATMs are about to get a cloud makeover
Automated teller machines have been around for decades, but surprisingly few changes have been made to the technologies that run them. That’s about to change.NCR on Wednesday rolled out new software that will transform ATMs to use the cloud with Android and a thin-client model of computing. The result, it says, will be a big boost in security as well as dramatically lower costs.Most of the world’s 2.2 million or so ATMs today are essentially thick-client PCs, and the vast majority of them—as much as 75 percent—run Windows XP, NCR says. It’s perhaps no wonder that security is an issue, yet banks typically must still administer updates manually to each ATM in their network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Don’t look now, but ATMs are about to get a cloud makeover
Automated teller machines have been around for decades, but surprisingly few changes have been made to the technologies that run them. That’s about to change.NCR on Wednesday rolled out new software that will transform ATMs to use the cloud with Android and a thin-client model of computing. The result, it says, will be a big boost in security as well as dramatically lower costs.Most of the world’s 2.2 million or so ATMs today are essentially thick-client PCs, and the vast majority of them—as much as 75 percent—run Windows XP, NCR says. It’s perhaps no wonder that security is an issue, yet banks typically must still administer updates manually to each ATM in their network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft scoops up Datazen to help mobilize BI
Microsoft has been nothing if not voracious this year when it comes to acquiring promising young companies, and on Tuesday it snatched up yet another: Datazen Software, which focuses on mobile business intelligence.Datazen’s technology will complement Microsoft’s cloud-based Power BI business-analytics service with mobile BI capabilities that are designed for on-premises implementation and optimized for SQL Server, Kamal Hathi, Microsoft’s partner director for cloud and enterprise, wrote in a blog post announcing the news.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft brings DelBene back for strategy and planning
Kurt DelBene, who left his role as president of Microsoft’s Office Division back in 2013, is returning to Microsoft as executive vice president of corporate strategy and planning, and will report to CEO Satya Nadella.Following his departure from Microsoft, DelBene was tapped by President Obama to take charge of the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov website at the Department of Health and Human Services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?
Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?
Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce revs up Pardot with two new B2B marketing-automation tools
It’s coming up on two years since Salesforce acquired Pardot, and on Thursday the company enriched its resulting Sales Cloud B2B marketing-automation product with two new key capabilities.Intelligent Engagement Studio, for instance, offers granular targeting, testing and reporting capabilities designed to help marketers and sales teams connect with prospects in new ways. For example, the new feature enables adaptive lead-nurturing campaigns that evolve based on more than 100 triggers.Previously, B2B marketers could see only basic behavioral data such as the rates at which prospects opened their emails; sales-stage data from their CRM systems was not integrated with it. Now, with Intelligent Engagement Studio, marketers can act on the combination of those data points. So, when someone advances to a new sales stage and also views a specific piece of content, Intelligent Engagement Studio will analyze those data points to proactively route the prospect to a new lead-nurturing path.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce revs up Pardot with two new B2B marketing-automation tools
It’s coming up on two years since Salesforce acquired Pardot, and on Thursday the company enriched its resulting Sales Cloud B2B marketing-automation product with two new key capabilities.Intelligent Engagement Studio, for instance, offers granular targeting, testing and reporting capabilities designed to help marketers and sales teams connect with prospects in new ways. For example, the new feature enables adaptive lead-nurturing campaigns that evolve based on more than 100 triggers.Previously, B2B marketers could see only basic behavioral data such as the rates at which prospects opened their emails; sales-stage data from their CRM systems was not integrated with it. Now, with Intelligent Engagement Studio, marketers can act on the combination of those data points. So, when someone advances to a new sales stage and also views a specific piece of content, Intelligent Engagement Studio will analyze those data points to proactively route the prospect to a new lead-nurturing path.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Workday targets professional services with new suite
Anyone who’s ever worked in professional services knows that the focus there on people and billable projects can open up a world of specialized requirements from any supporting business software. With that very distinction in mind, Workday on Thursday unveiled a new suite of financial and human-resources tools designed specifically for professional services users.Offering functionality for both financial management and human capital management, Workday Professional Services Automation aims to give companies a unified alternative to the patchwork of often-disconnected solutions that many currently rely on. A single system delivers insights and analytics regarding people, revenue, expenses and profitability, allowing customers to optimize project performance, Workday said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The FTC is worried about algorithmic transparency, and you should be too
It’s no secret that algorithms power much of the technology we interact with every day, whether it’s to search for information on Google or to browse through a Facebook news feed. What’s less widely known is that algorithms also play a role when we apply for a loan, for example, or receive a special marketing offer.Algorithms are practically everywhere we are today, shaping what we see, what we believe and, to an increasing extent, what our futures hold. Is that a good thing? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, like many others, isn’t so sure.“Consumers interact with algorithms on a daily basis, whether they know it or not,” said Ashkan Soltani, the FTC’s chief technologist. “To date, we have very little insight as to how these algorithms operate, what incentives are behind them, what data is used and how it’s structured.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here