Katherine Noyes
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Katherine Noyes
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Oracle bolsters Retail Cloud with new services
It’s been just over half a year since Oracle completed its US$5.3 billion acquisition of Micros, and on Wednesday the company added several new services to the retail-focused technologies it gained through that deal.Six new Oracle Retail cloud services, specifically, are now available by subscription, with the goal of helping retailers manage e-commerce, customer engagement, order management, order fulfillment, loss prevention and brand compliance.Oracle’s new Retail Brand Compliance Management cloud service, for instance, automates many of the operations required to grow and improve private-label merchandising operations. Retailers can use it to plan, track and manage merchandising activities, drop shipping and supplier relationships.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Oracle bolsters Marketing Cloud to show CMOs the big picture
It’s a common theme that spans functional areas within the organization: data remains stuck in silos, making it all but impossible for decision-makers to get a glimpse at the big picture. Zeroing in on marketers’ experience of this problem, Oracle on Wednesday rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers.Among the new features unveiled at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event this week in Las Vegas are Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect.Oracle ID Graph is designed to help marketers connect the many identities a consumer may have across channels and devices and understand that they all belong to the same person.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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HP hits former Autonomy execs with $5B suit
The UK’s Serious Fraud Office may have dropped its investigation of software firm Autonomy earlier this year, but that doesn’t appear to have done much to allay HP’s ire. HP—which acquired Autonomy in 2011—has confirmed that it plans to sue Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s former CEO and CFO, for $5.1 billion.HP filed a Claim Form against Lynch and Hussain on Monday alleging they engaged in fraudulent activities while executives at Autonomy, an HP spokeswoman said via email. “The lawsuit seeks damages from them of approximately $5.1 billion.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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GinzaMetrics helps marketers get more bang for their social buck
Hard on the heels of its Competitor Discovery tool last month, GinzaMetrics has unveiled a new set of tools that aims to help marketers understand the impact of their social-media efforts.Its Social Intelligence Suite can reveal how social channels are contributing to revenue and other goals so brands can better plan how to use them for marketing. The suite has four tools, focused on marketing channel performance, the competitor social landscape, content insights and social engagement analytics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Ellison swings at Salesforce as Oracle’s growth sputters
Oracle expects to generate more than $1 billion in new SaaS and PaaS business in 2015, putting it toe-to-toe in the cloud market with Salesforce.com, Oracle’s top executives said Tuesday.“It’s going to be close, but you won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this,” Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison told financial analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call.Oracle’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenue grew by 30 percent to $372 million in the quarter ended Feb. 28, the third of Oracle’s fiscal year. Adjusting for strong currency fluctuations, the growth would have been 34 percent, Oracle said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM gets an analytics-infused update
Following the launch of Dynamics CRM 2015 last November, Microsoft on Monday announced a Spring update to the software that promises new social, mobile and analytics capabilities along with closer integration with Office 365.On the social front, for instance, the Spring ‘15 release of Microsoft’s customer relationship management suite offers a new social center where marketing, sales and service teams can monitor social topics and engage directly with communities. Companies can create end-to-end customer engagements from social posts, while social analytics tools now offer text mining, cloud visualization and a social activity map. Tying it all together, Microsoft said, is a redesigned user interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This isn’t your father’s enterprise software
When Patrick Benson joined Ovation Brands back in September 2013, he was given a tall order: modernize an array of legacy IT systems that could no longer keep up with the restaurant-chain conglomerate’s business processes.“I was strapped to a rocket and shot out of a cannon,” said Benson, the company’s CIO. “My job was to figure out what tools were needed.”Originally founded in 1983 under the name Old Country Buffet, Ovation had grown considerably over the years to comprise more than 300 restaurants in 35 states, operating under brands including Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse and Ryan’s.“We were conducting business in a much different way that was better and faster than our systems could keep up with,” Benson explained.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This isn’t your father’s enterprise software
When Patrick Benson joined Ovation Brands back in September 2013, he was given a tall order: modernize an array of legacy IT systems that could no longer keep up with the restaurant-chain conglomerate’s business processes.“I was strapped to a rocket and shot out of a cannon,” said Benson, the company’s CIO. “My job was to figure out what tools were needed.”Originally founded in 1983 under the name Old Country Buffet, Ovation had grown considerably over the years to comprise more than 300 restaurants in 35 states, operating under brands including Tahoe Joe’s Famous Steakhouse and Ryan’s.“We were conducting business in a much different way that was better and faster than our systems could keep up with,” Benson explained.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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New Chrome app puts Act-On’s marketing automation tools front and center for SMBs
Few would dispute marketing automation’s potential to benefit corporate marketing efforts, but with all the many and varied tools out there, keeping campaigns coordinated and cohesive can be difficult.With such challenges in mind, Act-On Software on Wednesday launched Act-On Anywhere, an application that makes the engagement data, assets and functionality of the company’s SaaS platform available from anywhere within the browser.An explosion of stand-alone tools has created a marketing climate in which fragmentation is a major problem, said Act-On, which targets SMBs with its platform. In fact, a full 83 percent of marketers cite fragmented systems as one of their most troublesome challenges, according to a study the company recently conducted with Gleanster Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Adobe extends its Marketing Cloud to IoT and beyond
Adobe’s Marketing Cloud has offered enterprises a tool for integrated online marketing and Web analytics for several years already, but on Tuesday the company announced numerous new extensions to the technology.Among the products unveiled at the Adobe Summit going on in Salt Lake City this week are new marketing tools designed with the Internet of Things in mind.A feature called Adobe Experience Manager Screens, for example, aims to help brands extend interactive content including images, 3D interactive models, video and more to physical locations such as retail stores, hotels and even devices like vending machines.A new IoT software development kit, meanwhile, lets brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across connected devices, while new Intelligent Location capabilities allow companies to tap GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Box snaps up Subspace for heightened BYOD security
Hard on the heels of debuting a cloud storage service for financial services firms, Box announced Tuesday that it has acquired Subspace, a startup focused on cross-device collaboration security.“The Subspace team will let us go even deeper with our security and data policies, enabling reliable corporate security policies, even when content leaves the Box platform to be accessed on a customer or partner’s device,” Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM rolls out 3 new iOS apps for enterprises
IBM has unveiled a fresh crop of enterprise apps resulting from the partnership it forged with Apple last year.Announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the three new mobile apps for iOS target the banking, retail and airline industries and join the 10 industry-specific IBM MobileFirst apps that arrived in December.Advisor Alerts, for example, is designed for enterprises in banking and financial services and aims to help financial professionals prioritize client-related tasks while away from the office. Powered by customized analytics, the app includes a personalized dashboard that displays recommended next steps and alerts about portfolio-affecting events; it also provides a platform for communication with colleagues back at the office.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM rolls out 3 new iOS apps for enterprises
IBM has unveiled a fresh crop of enterprise apps resulting from the partnership it forged with Apple last year. Announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the three new mobile apps for iOS target the banking, retail and airline industries and join the 10 industry-specific IBM MobileFirst apps that arrived in December.+ See our full coverage of MWC 2015 + Advisor Alerts, for example, is designed for enterprises in banking and financial services and aims to help financial professionals prioritize client-related tasks while away from the office. Powered by customized analytics, the app includes a personalized dashboard that displays recommended next steps and alerts about portfolio-affecting events; it also provides a platform for communication with colleagues back at the office.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM to pump $4 billion into cloud, mobile and analytics
IBM will dedicate $4 billion in spending this year to the cloud, analytics and mobile technologies, as it struggles with seismic shifts that are changing the computing landscape it once dominated, In return, by 2018 IBM expects to reap a combined $40 billion in annual revenue from the areas in which it's investing, which also include social and security, the company said at an annual meeting on Thursday. It could use the growth. IBM's sales declined to about $93 billion last year, from just over $98 billion in 2013, thanks to declines in some of its traditional businesses and the sale of two big hardware divisions to Lenovo and GlobalFoundries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Box woos financial services firms with a tailored cloud offering
It was just about two weeks ago that Box set out to remove a major barrier to the cloud for security-minded organizations with its Encryption Key Management capability. Now, it's taken that focus a step further with a full-fledged cloud storage service aimed squarely at financial services firms.The aim behind Box's EKM, now in beta, is to give businesses in highly regulated industries such as finance the ability to maintain exclusive control over the digital keys used to encrypt their data.Historically, the lack of that kind of control is a big part of what has kept many companies in such industries off of the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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NetSfere promises enterprise messaging with end-to-end security
If all the well-publicized hacks over the past year or so have had any effect on the corporate world, it’s been to make enterprises more worried than ever about security. Throw in the bring-your-own-device trend, and that concern gets compounded considerably.Such issues were part of the motivation for the recent launch of the Confide app for confidential enterprise messaging, and they’re also a big piece of the thinking behind the NetSfere messaging service that Infinite Convergence rolled out on Tuesday.Though Infinite Convergence launched its cloud-based messaging service for enterprises on a trial basis last fall, the security-minded offering just became globally available. Device-to-device encryption and administrative controls are among the service’s key features, which add up to end-to-end secure messaging capabilities, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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NetSfere promises enterprise messaging with end-to-end security
If all the well-publicized hacks over the past year or so have had any effect on the corporate world, it’s been to make enterprises more worried than ever about security. Throw in the bring-your-own-device trend, and that concern gets compounded considerably.Such issues were part of the motivation for the recent launch of the Confide app for confidential enterprise messaging, and they’re also a big piece of the thinking behind the NetSfere messaging service that Infinite Convergence rolled out on Tuesday.Though Infinite Convergence launched its cloud-based messaging service for enterprises on a trial basis last fall, the security-minded offering just became globally available. Device-to-device encryption and administrative controls are among the service’s key features, which add up to end-to-end secure messaging capabilities, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Salesforce brings more analytics power to mobile business users
Analytics is not a domain everyone’s brain can adapt to easily. Combining statistics, data visualization, operations research, programming savvy and more, the field has relied largely on specialists to make its data-focused interpretations useful in the practical sphere.That, however, is slowly changing. Along with the rise of Big Data, efforts are increasingly emerging to put the power of analytics in the hands of business managers, often using the tools for mobile devices that are popular today.A case in point is Salesforce.com’s Wave Analytics Cloud, which the company updated Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM’s Robert LeBlanc has his head in the cloud
IBM’s new man in charge of the cloud business is moving fast.“What I’m focusing on is speed,” said Robert LeBlanc, the new senior vice president for IBM Cloud. “Because the market continues to change, we have to get things to market quickly and then iterate.”LeBlanc is in a key spot at IBM: the company’s cloud-related technologies enjoyed a whopping 60 percent growth to $7 billion in 2014. The growth came much sooner than expected, and that’s critical in the midst of the company’s ongoing struggle to shift focus from low-margin hardware to the new paradigm of cloud computing.That struggle was evident in IBM’s financial results for 2014. The fourth quarter brought yet another decline in sales—it was the 11th consecutive quarter to do so—and profit targets for 2015 were down as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Vint Cerf worries about a ‘digital dark age,’ and your data could be at risk
In this era of the all-pervasive cloud, it’s easy to assume that the data we store will somehow be preserved forever. The only thing to fret about from a posterity perspective, we might think, is the analog information from days gone by—all the stuff on papers, tapes and other pre-digital formats that haven’t been explicitly converted.Vinton Cerf, often called “the father of the Internet,” has other ideas.Now chief Internet evangelist at Google, Cerf spoke this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he painted a very different picture.Rather than a world where longevity is a given, Cerf fears a “digital dark age” in which the rapid evolution of technology quickly makes storage formats obsolete thanks to a phenomenon he calls “bit rot.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here