Stories by Chris Kanaracus

IBM and Twitter have announced a partnership that will merge Twitter's massive flows of social media data with Big Blue's analytics software, including Watson.

The knock against Salesforce.com has long been for its lack of robust analytics, but the company is hoping to change that perception and challenge the competition with Wave, its sixth discrete Cloud service.

It seems that a week doesn't go by these days without major software vendors announcing updates to their marketing software portfolios, and the past few days were no exception as rivals Oracle and Salesforce.com both made some news.

Microsoft is poised to release a major update to its Dynamics CRM and marketing applications in a bid to gain market share against rivals such as Salesforce.com.

Add Tibco to the list of vendors pushing a full stack of so-called "customer engagement" software, which companies use to track and analyze consumer behavior in hopes of building deeper relationships with them and ultimately, selling more products and services.

Tibco's board of directors has begun a review of "strategic and financial alternatives," which presumably include a sale, the middleware vendor has confirmed following a news report of its plans.

Teradata has made its third acquisition of a company specializing in big data within about a month, with the latest deal involving consulting firm Think Big Analytics

IBM hopes to expand its customer base and sell to executives outside of IT, including marketers, with a new set of consulting services that can be bought online with a credit card.

Salesforce.com is combining its Pardot marketing software, sales automation application and social communities platform into a new product called Sales Reach, which it says can help salespeople nurture leads and make deals in real time.

Salesforce.com recently launched a new product called Social Studio in spite of the fact that an existing, competing product had already used that name for years, marketing software vendor StrongView Systems alleges in a new trademark-infringement lawsuit.

Oracle has hooked up its SRM (social relationship management) software suite to LinkedIn, a move to give marketing and customer support staffers a way to reach the business-oriented social network's 300 million users.

Startup WibiData has launched a platform aimed at giving marketing teams and data scientists the means to create highly personalized retail shopping experiences.

SAP is scooping up SeeWhy, maker of real-time targeted marketing software, in a bid to flesh out the omni-channel commerce platform it gained through last year's acquisition of Hybris.

Salesforce.com is releasing Social Studio, a new product that combines features from its Radian6 social-media-monitoring technology with the content publishing capabilities of its Buddy Media software for marketers.

Tibco has acquired Jaspersoft for US$185 million in a deal that will give it a widely used embedded BI (business-intelligence) suite to sell alongside its existing Spotfire analytics product.