Florida-based Fanhub has rolled out a social CRM system that introduces follows, comments, @mentions and notifications into sales, support and case management, promising enhanced collaboration among coworkers. According to the company’s website, the software was designed by employees of parent…
inContact has released the first of two enhancements to its cloud-based contact center software planned for 2014. Highlights of the update include context-aware SMS capability for mobile interactions, more integration and new features for the company’s Personal Connection Outbound Solution.…
Both Google Play and Apple’s iOS App Store offer options that allow companies to distribute proprietary applications to their employees. Some software vendors, like SAP, offer stores where customers can purchase enterprise apps. But neither type of store seems geared…
Cloud marketing is one of the hottest software categories around right now, as evidenced by Oracle’s string of cloud marketing acquisitions and Salesforce’s push for its Salesforce1 platform, not to mention Adobe’s ambitious theme of “reinventing marketing.” So it’s no…
Birst, a provider of cloud business intelligence, has made its Birst Visualizer software, first introduced to a select group of users in December, now available to all customers. The visualization tool combines Google-like search and Amazon-like recommendations to offer business…
InsightSquared, a startup founded in late 2010, seems to be following a success formula right out of a business textbook. Its management team is packed with Harvard Business School MBA holders who possess a broad range of IT and business…
Clari, provider of a mobile-first sales productivity platform, is releasing its product, which it says offers an easy-to-use window into the information sources of sales teams, with content organized around their deals and their relationships. According to Clari, which recently…
C9, a provider of predictive sales and marketing applications, has unrolled LeadMap for Marketo, an app that gives marketing and sales organizations an end-to-end view of sales pipelines. By merging Marketo and SalesForce.com data to create a unified view of…
Retailers, more than many other businesses, seem poised to use Big Data analytics to their competitive advantage. Yet many of them are still struggling to leverage Big Data, according to new research from IDC Retail Insights that examined the maturity…
Simply Measured, a provider of social media analytics software, raised $20 million in a Series C round of funding led by Trinity Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Four Rivers Group, MHS Capital and other existing investors. As the…
CRM software provider Gainsight has updated its platform with new capabilities that it says will enable companies to increase retention revenue by better serving their largest and most strategic customers. Such customers are important because they account for so much…
Like many other technology initiatives, measuring return on investment (ROI) for mobility programs can be tricky. Even companies that calculate ROI often base it on “soft” benefits such as customer satisfaction improvements rather than hard ones such as increased sales,…
Email – especially business email – has gotten a bad name, as anyone who has been the helpless captive of a long and irrelevant string of messages can attest. This comic from The Oatmeal lists just a few of the…
Adam Marchick, CEO of mobile marketing automation provider Kahuna, says companies are failing miserably at their goal to send the right marketing messages to the right people at the right time. He likens push notifications, a hugely popular method for…
AdStage, provider of a self-service advertising platform that it bills as a single place to build, manage and optimize ad campaigns across search, social, mobile and display ad networks, has raised $1 million in additional seed funding by Digital Garage,…
According to Gartner, the CRM market will reach $23.9 billion this year after several years of strong growth. Given that level of investment, companies obviously want to get as much value as possible out of their systems. It’s unfortunate, then,…
InsightSquared, a provider of business analytics software for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), has introduced a QuickBooks analytics and reporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that it promises will make it easier for companies to glean real-time sales, profit and loss and…
When Enterprise Apps Today asked experts to pick their top business intelligence trends for 2014, we came up with a list of seven. A single, overarching theme – the need to make BI more accessible and understandable to larger numbers…
Enterprise collaboration has been on many business wish lists for a long time. But it is proving to be an unusually tough nut to crack. Gartner last year predicted that half of large companies would use internal social networks by…
OpenText, a Canada-based provider of enterprise information management (EIM) software, has updated its OpenText Tempo product line with new social collaboration capabilities, as well as note-taking and organizing functionality and enterprise file synchronization and share. OpenText’s new bundled offering, which…
While many organizations are still experimenting with Big Data analytics rather than undertaking full deployments, they want to achieve value from their initiatives sooner rather than later and are thus looking to areas such as automation and machine learning to…
By Michele Nemschoff, MapR Technologies Big Data can be extremely valuable for any business, and most businesses recognize this. In fact, a survey completed by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) found that three out of four respondents believe data…
Brainshark, a provider of cloud-based software used for business presentations, has released several packaged applications designed to make it easier for customers to purchase and use video presentation technology geared toward specific functional needs. The packages include the Brainshark Sales…
Talygen, a provider of business software including software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for project management and CRM, has introduced a bulk mail feature for its CRM software. The bulk mail tool enables organizations to quickly send emails to large groups of people…
“You want to make sure you find the right software. If you are implementing a product that cannot handle the complexities of manufacturing, that will lead to more customization, which can really drive up costs,” he said. Ann All is…
When Enterprise Apps Today asked experts to pick their top ERP trends for 2014, cloud and mobile not surprisingly showed up on many of their lists. While these technologies have already made a major impact on other enterprise applications, ERP…
Workforce optimization and customer analytics provider Verint Systems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kana Software, which provides customer service solutions delivered both on-premises and in the cloud, for approximately $514 million in cash. The aim of the acquisition…
Customization has long been considered a practice best avoided in enterprise software, due to the belief it drives up both complexity and cost. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have used this belief as a selling point for their solutions, promising they require…
By Anthony Wilkey More and more, customers expect more personalized, real-time interactions across email, mobile, social, Web and offline channels. Thus it will be increasingly important in 2014 for businesses to engage their customers with relevant marketing messages that will…
While Big Data technologies present some exciting new opportunities for marketers, few marketers appear to be realizing Big Data benefits. According to a Customer Sales Intelligence Scorecard and report compiled by the CMO Council, the majority of marketing executives are…
By Michele Nemschoff, MapR Technologies The thought of evaluating whether a particular technology is right for your company can conjure up feelings of stress, anxiety and ambiguity, especially when fielding ROI questions from the CIO and CFO. As more and…
When addressing the problem of so-called “shadow” IT – the use of unauthorized business applications, a trend facilitated by the popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) – companies usually view their IT organizations as a kind of “app police,” responsible for detecting…
BIME Analytics, a French company that offers a stack of business intelligence services (BI) and tools in the cloud, has secured a Series A round of funding worth $4 million, led by Alven Capital Partners in Paris. This round follows…
Big Data is often described by citing three of its characteristics: volume, velocity and variety. While many people believe focusing on those three things can help enterprises make better decisions, just the opposite may be true, says Larry Freed, CEO…
SAP doesn’t see much point in collaboration simply for collaboration’s sake in the enterprise. The software giant calls it “a nice idea, but unless it is connected to a business process, it is little more than that.” SAP hoped to…
Salesforce.com has been spending big on cloud marketing technology over the past few years. It spent $2.5 billion to acquire ExactTarget in June, after purchasing social marketing companies Radian6 and Buddy Media in 2011. As analysts noted in 2012, after…
Shortages of scarce skills usually create two things: higher salaries for the desired skills and creative approaches for increasing the supply of folks who possess those skills. Professionals with Big Data analytics skills are certainly commanding high salaries. As Eric…
While many folks have smartphones loaded with mobile apps for personal tasks from vacation planning to just killing time, most of us haven’t used them as much for work duties. That is beginning to change, though, with a growing number…
Of all the enterprise apps it makes sense to mobilize, CRM is at the top of the list. Both sales people and their customers are spending more and more time on the go and performing a growing number of tasks…
As demand for mobile CRM kicks into high gear, AppMesh is betting its mobile solution will help it gain traction in a CRM market largely dominated by Salesforce.com. The San Francisco startup, which was founded by Salesforce veterans Leo Tenenblat…
Earlier this year Gartner analyst Laura McLellan sent some shockwaves through the C-suite with her prediction that chief marketing officers will spend more on IT than chief information officers by 2017. Yet it isn’t that surprising, given recent software spending…
Many ERP projects are deemed failures because of budget overruns and lengthy implementation delays. Panorama Consulting’s 2013 ERP Report found that 53 percent of its survey respondents experienced cost overruns in their ERP implementations in 2012, while 61 exceeded their…
As the result of a new agreement with SAP, Xactly Corporation will integrate Xactly Incent, its cloud-based incentive compensation management software, with SAP Cloud for Customer solutions, including the SAP Cloud for Sales desktop and mobile products. “Our deepened relationship…
Marketing has long prided itself on its ability to produce creative advertising campaigns that win over large groups of customers. In recent years, however, the focus has turned to presenting smaller groups of consumers with more targeted offers based on…
Video calling was one of six key call center trends identified by Enterprise Apps Today last summer. The story on call center trends quoted Laura Bassett, director of Marketing, Customer Experience and Emerging Technologies at Avaya: “Younger generations are showing…
In the quarter century he has been following the use of business intelligence (BI) in the enterprise, Howard Dresner has seen trends come and go. One that seems solidly entrenched, though, is organizations’ desire to get BI into the hands…
Godard Abel is gunning for Gartner. Abel founded a startup called G2 Crowd, a company that grew out of his own experiences as both a buyer and seller of enterprise software. Gartner “had the perfect business model for the 1980s”…
A growing number of companies find themselves in the market for data scientists. Seventy percent of organizations recently surveyed by New Vantage Partners said they planned on hiring data scientists, a role the survey defined as “applying varying degrees of…
Companies have no problem accumulating data. According to an IDC study sponsored by EMC Corporation, the amount of digital data will reach 40,000 exabytes by 2020, up from 130 exabytes in 2005. However, they do have problems analyzing it. The…
NextPrinciples, a ZDNet 2013 CRM Watchlist winner, today introduced an integrated social analytics and engagement platform called Insight-to-Action. The product, one of a growing number of social listening solutions, is designed to help medium-to-large organizations create, manage and monitor lasting…