Salesforce.com recently celebrated its 15th year in existence, and as the SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendor races toward US$5 billion in revenue its influence on the industry is being felt more than ever. At the same time, some signs indicate that Salesforce.com is having a few growing pains, as well as showing some trappings of the mega-vendors it once mocked with its "End of Software" marketing campaign.
SAP and BMW have created a prototype that uses SAP's HANA in-memory database platform to send personalized services and offers to people as they drive around in their cars.
Oracle is moving into the market for big customer data by buying BlueKai, which aggregates data on consumers and offers it to marketers via a platform for running targeted marketing campaigns on the Web, offline and on mobile devices. Terms of the deal, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.
After spending billions to acquire a series of marketing-related software companies, Oracle is now undergoing the process of creating a unified suite it can take to battle against competing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft.
Microsoft is about to make a fresh run at its CRM (customer relationship management) rival Salesforce.com with new capabilities for marketing automation, customer support and social media monitoring.
Customer experience has emerged as one of the enterprise software industry's hotter segments of late, as companies try to run marketing, sales and support across both traditional and digital channels.
Infor is buying PeopleAnswers, maker of software companies can use to analyze a job candidate's behavioral traits before deciding whether to make a hire. Terms of the deal, which was announced Wednesday, were not disclosed.
Oracle has broadened the number of languages its social media analysis software supports, in a bid to appeal to enterprises with operations and customers across the world.
Oracle is set to acquire business-to-consumer marketing software vendor Responsys for US$1.5 billion in a bid to flesh out its own capabilities as well as strike back at rivals such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft.
Much has been made about the "Internet of things," but behind every device is a customer, and companies that fail to recognize this do so at their own peril, according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
The Hadoop programming framework may be synonymous with the Big Data movement but it's not the only tool companies need to derive insights from massive stores of unstructured information, according to Facebook analytics chief, Ken Rudin.
Oracle is rolling out a series of new features for its Eloqua marketing automation suite, hoping to get a leg up on rivals such as Salesforce.com and IBM in the red-hot software segment.
Oracle is hoping to differentiate its CRM (customer relationship management) software from the competition with the acquisition of BigMachines, whose cloud-based system helps salespeople quickly put together and price complex orders.
Agribusiness giant Monsanto is paying US$930 million to acquire the Climate Corporation, maker of a software platform that crunches weather-related data in order to help farmers more effectively grow crops.
Oracle is doubling down on "big data" with a number of new products and enhancements to existing ones, in hopes that customers looking to analyze massive amounts of information for business insights will in turn invest further in Oracle.
