Stories by Katherine Noyes

The average company has about 70 different types of third-party code on its website but is aware of only about a third of them. The rest are hidden in services like ad networks, widgets and analytics tools, and they can bog down performance, threaten security and compromise search-engine optimization.

Simplicity is an oft-cited goal in the world of enterprise software, but by most accounts, it's rarely achieved. Percolate is hoping to change that, at least for marketing professionals.

There's been a flurry of speculation that Salesforce.com could be up for sale, but an alternative line of thinking points to a deal with Sage Group as the explanation for the team of lawyers Salesforce recently hired.

While marketers want to engage customers in a unified way, disconnected systems often make that difficult. Adobe and Microsoft aim to tackle that problem by integrating Adobe's Marketing Cloud with Dynamics CRM.

Google said in February that it was going to make mobile-friendliness matter more to its search-engine rankings. On Tuesday, it makes good on that commitment -- and webmasters who didn't heed the warning may see a steep drop in traffic.

It's coming up on two years since Salesforce acquired Pardot, and on Thursday the company enriched its resulting Sales Cloud B2B marketing-automation product with two new key capabilities.

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.

There's nothing like a brand-new medium to put marketing departments into overdrive, and it would be hard to find a better example than the recent, rapid-fire arrival of live-stream video apps Meerkat and Periscope.

A bumper crop of new analytics tools has arrived for business users over the past few weeks, and on Tuesday SAP rolled out two fresh examples. Both promising simplicity and usability for non-experts, SAP Predictive Analytics 2.0 offers updated capabilities for enterprises seeking insight into large volumes of data such as from the Internet of Things, while a new Edge edition of SAP's Lumira tool targets small and medium-size businesses with data-discovery features.

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.

It's no secret that cloud computing and data analytics are both rapidly growing areas of IT. Put them together, and you get a winning combination that's expected to grow by more than 26 percent annually over the next five years.