San Francisco-based startup ToutApp is trying to bring a platform approach to sales software, in the same way companies like Marketo and Eloqua did for marketing software, by unifying useful sales tools and packaging them in a user-friendly way. “We…
Though most folks still associate Salesforce.com with CRM, given that the company pioneered the concept of CRM delivered as a cloud service rather than via on-premise software, the company has been working hard to expand its presence throughout the enterprise.…
Many experts believe the success of the Apple Watch, which is landing in the eager hands of early adopters today, will hinge on the apps. That may be a problem, given the somewhat motley assortment now on offer, which according…
The CFO and the human resources executive are the Mars and Venus of the enterprise, which can make things interesting at budget time. “Human resources is all about the people, while corporate finance is all about the bottom line,” said…
There is no issue more pressing in human capital management (HCM) than employee retention, points out Leighanne Levensaler, senior vice president of products for Workday, a provider of HCM software. Writing in a blog post, she cited the high rates…
Finance departments are increasingly seeking more sophisticated analytics, self-service analytics and improved access to financial and operational data. Yet Excel spreadsheets remain the analytic tool of choice for most finance professionals. “Our recent research shows that most companies still use…
Plenty of balls will fly through the air during tonight’s NCAA men’s college basketball championship game between Duke University and the University of Wisconsin. But it’s nothing compared to all of the balls in the air that event organizers must…
Enterprise service bus (ESB) is an outmoded data integration technology that has no place in enterprises in which data comes from a diverse and growing number of applications both inside and outside corporate walls. “[ESB] is a one-vendor lock-in model…
Last year was a good one for HTML5. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) gave the cross-platform application development language “recommendation” status, its highest level of endorsement. YouTube made HTML5 its default video delivery platform, signaling both its dissatisfaction with…
If there is one trait that distinguishes successful startups from less successful ones, it is coming up with the right idea at the right time. Even the best ideas will not take off if the market is not ready for…
Productivity can take a hit when users switch from one application to another multiple times a day. It’s an especially big problem in marketing, thanks to the plethora of tools in use at many organizations. According to a recent survey…
As anyone with a smartphone knows, mobile apps are becoming a big deal in the workplace. Anecdotally, many of us use mobile apps to help us get work done on our mobile devices. Every few months, a survey is released…
Now we know how much the Apple Watch will cost ($350 to $1,099 and, for big spenders, an 18-karat gold version for $10,000), when it is coming (April 24, with pre-orders starting April 10) and what you can do with…
On the most recent earnings call for Salesforce.com, CEO Marc Benioff touted growing adoption of the company’s Service Cloud and Analytics Cloud, the latter of which is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history, Benioff said. Not surprisingly Salesforce is…
As Enterprise Apps Today reported a few months ago, companies are finding new uses for their service management software. Traditionally under the purview of the IT organization, it is now being used by business functions throughout the enterprise such as…
Companies finally appear to be making business intelligence accessible to a broader group of users, according to at least one recent survey. Momentum is growing, thanks to an increase in self-service data discovery options, said Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC,…
By Sean Allen, OutSystems The pressure is mounting. Business managers want mobile apps to drive revenue. Marketing wants mobile apps to improve customer loyalty. Internal users want to access their work apps from their mobile devices. Customers want mobile apps…
Growth in mobile business intelligence has been steady but slow, according to many experts. But 120 days after the introduction of its Wave analytics platform, Salesforce is “doubling down” on mobile analytics at the request of its customers, said Stephanie…
It’s hard to read a technology publication – including this one – without encountering multiple mentions of Hadoop, but it’s a different story in your average office cubicle. That realization led Xplenty, an Israeli startup that provides a cloud-based data…
One of the original promises of the cloud was that enterprises could buy computing infrastructure on-demand, so they could save money by scaling up only when needed. Most cloud applications, however, carry licensing terms that are not much more flexible…
Thanks to the consumerization of IT, enterprise software has gotten a lot sexier. Folks bring their personal software preferences for attractive and intuitive user interfaces with them to work. As a result, it’s the rare enterprise software vendor that does…
Given that inspiration to brainstorm an idea with colleagues can strike at any time and in any place, demand for mobile collaboration apps should be especially high. Social software provider Jive, best known for helping enterprises establish online communities…
One of the trickiest tasks for enterprise software giants like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft is offering the cloud-based applications that are increasingly chosen for new deployments while not cannibalizing their existing on-premise software. SAP took a step in that direction…
By Rex Ahlstrom, BackOffice Associates As enterprises enter the New Year, many are reflecting on the initiatives that enabled them to get their data houses in order in 2014 — whether through data migrations, M&A consolidation activities or data quality…
Enterprise applications in the cloud are a no-brainer for business organizations and end users, thanks to their flexibility, speed of deployment and ease of use. In many if not most cases, business organizations can buy enterprise cloud apps with no…
Last month when I spoke to Carsten Bange, CEO of BARC and co-author of its BI Survey 14, he positioned mobile business intelligence as a trend that generated lots of hype but had experienced little traction in the enterprise. Use…
If you want to make a CEO’s eyes glaze over, talk to her about Hadoop. While techies and developers can kill an afternoon debating the merits of different Hadoop distributions, non-techies tend to be put off by its complexity. Making…
Lower cost, enhanced flexibility and speedier deployments are among the key selling points for cloud applications. It turns out they can make employees happier too, according to a recent survey from IT services provider Softchoice. While this may not wow…
Business technology is rarely seen as “sexy.” Yet despite the recent focus on the consumerization of IT, the enterprise has often led the way with technology innovations such as the personal computer. And the BlackBerry was released eight years before…
By Pedro Cardoso, BackOffice Associates In my last article, we discussed how organizations can effectively deliver, improve and sustain business outcomes and value by embracing a “data first” approach. In this post we’ll take a look at some examples of…
For years companies have indicated they wanted to take business intelligence and analytics out of the purview of data specialists and make it more available to “average” business users. Despite this, the numbers of workers using BI remained low. “We’re…
Attunity, a provider of data management software, is beefing up its Big Data offerings by acquiring the data warehouse automation technology of Dutch company BIReady. According to Attunity, the technology automatically designs, generates and populates enterprise data warehouses and data…
Most people have wallets loaded with loyalty program cards and/or smartphones loaded with loyalty apps. Yet most companies are not capitalizing on this trend, hints a study from the International Institute for Analytics (IIA). Just 16 percent of companies surveyed…
In a recent discussion about how the Internet of Things will change Big Data analytics, a Cisco executive said companies will need to assess their data infrastructures and tweak them to support the rapidly growing amount of data and sophisticated…
Marketers are bullish on mobile marketing, and especially on location-based services. Adobe is hoping to capitalize on this bullishness, with a new set of capabilities in its Marketing Cloud that can help marketers deliver effective promotions to mobile consumers. As…
Most social analytics tools use “mentions” as a key criteria for measuring campaign success, market interest or user enthusiasm for products. But mentions on their own do not yield especially helpful insights, said Katherine Matsumoto, senior product manager & NLP…
When Anaplan, a provider of cloud-based operations and financial planning software, raised $100 million in Series D funding last spring, the company’s CEO announced plans for a marketplace in which customers could share their enterprise planning applications. Anaplan is making…
It’s a new day for Workday, the maker of financial management and HR software, as it rolls out a suite of HR analytics applications called Insight Applications. The software is built on the technology Workday gained with its acquisition of…
Mobile devices play an increasingly prominent role in Americans’ online shopping experiences, a trend illustrated by growth in both online retail traffic and sales. According to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, mobile accounted for 39.7 percent of all online retail traffic…
Companies have almost more marketing data than they can handle, coming from a variety of channels and applications, which can make it tough to create cohesive customer strategies. Because of this, many marketers are looking for software to help them…
“Self-service” is a term that implies ease of use. Yet too often, it’s not easy enough. While self-service business intelligence has been a hot tech trend for at least a couple of years, a new survey from Logi Analytics (registration…
Motherhood is hard for a working woman in any field, but especially so in industries like technology that cannot seem to shake their male-centric cultures. The issue recently heated up with Apple’s and Facebook’s decisions to offer coverage for female…
SAP’s HANA suffered an image problem a few months ago when three-quarters of the members of the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) who had not yet purchased any HANA products indicated they were unable to identify business cases that justified…
ERP is beginning to experience a shift that has already shaped other enterprise applications like CRM, according to a new survey from Epicor Software, with respondents indicating a desire for cloud ERP solutions. There is a clear ERP capability gap,…
One of the most interesting trends in recent memory is the adoption of IT service management (ITSM) in non-IT areas of companies like human resources and facilities management. Like IT organizations, these lines of business recognize the value of standardizing,…
Analytics is at the center of technology spending for many enterprises. “Analytics is the most desired function across all applications, as it’s where enterprises feel they have the largest gap,” Gartner analyst Bianca Granetto recently told Enterprise Apps Today, noting…
While CRM vendors are striving to improve the usability of their products, integration is a far bigger issue. There is much talk about offering a more holistic customer experience, but that is practically impossible to do when customer data is…
With less than a week to go until Dreamforce, CRM giant Salesforce is already making major announcements that foreshadow the focus of its flagship event. It has “reimagined” both its customer support and sales software, branding them in a way…
I recently wrote about a growing emphasis on usability in CRM applications, especially mobile apps. Vendors are focusing on improving the user interface of CRM, to boost the software’s stubbornly low adoption rate. About that adoption rate, Gartner released a…
By Tim Hegedus, Miro Consulting Nearly 60 percent of executives report having been audited by Microsoft in the last 12 months. The lesson: If you haven’t been audited by Microsoft recently, you likely will be soon. What’s driving Microsoft’s aggressive…