Microsoft announces GA of Dynamics 365 with AI features
We’ve been hearing all artificial intelligence, all the time from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry over the last several weeks. Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365 coming on November 1st.
Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM into a unified… Read More Continue reading Microsoft announces GA of Dynamics 365 with AI features
Last year Apttus, which provides pricing, quoting and contract building on the Salesforce platform was growing at a crazy rate. It appeared to be headed to IPO or a Salesforce purchase when it got a punch to the gut. Salesforce bought Steelbrick instead.
Salesforce has been on a shopping spree this year, spending in the neighborhood of $5-6 billion on 10 companies. That’s why it was interesting to hear company president, vice chairman and COO, Keith Block talk about what they look for in an acquisition target at a press conference at Dreamforce this week. This is particularly true in the context of rumors that Salesforce was interested… 
When Salesforce purchased Quip last summer for $750 million, it seemed on its face to be an unusual acquisition for the cloud CRM company. Salesforce tends to go hard for more vertical targets like Demandware, which it purchased for 2.8 billion last June.
Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff knows a thing or two about how to put on a good show, and as usual he pulled out all the stops this week at Dreamforce, his company’s massive customer conference in San Francisco. He was boasting at the keynote that 175,000 people registered online (and another 15 million were watching online). I can tell you most people I spoke to… 
Zenefits announced this week, it was making a licensing compliance app it created in-house to ensure its sales people are properly licensed to sell insurance in a given state, available for free to anyone to download from the Salesforce App Exchange. Last winter Zenefits was sailing along providing HR services in the cloud for small and medium businesses when a bombshell hit. Buzzfeed… 
Paperspace founders Daniel Kobran and Dillon Erb set out to solve a hard problem, one the typical startup might shy away from. They wanted to disrupt the mature virtual desktop market dominated by giants like VMware, Citrix and Amazon. Today they got a healthy $4 million seed round to pursue the dream — and announced general availability of the product. Investors for this round… 
Turns out Dreamforce isn’t the only enterprise conference going on this week. VMware is also holding its at AirWatch Connect conference in Atlanta, and today it announced support for enterprise smart glasses on the AirWatch enterprise mobility management platform. Smart glasses, which are essentially computers that sit on your face, haven’t found widespread usage quite yet, but… 
Base isn’t the biggest player in a crowded CRM market by any means, but it’s not shying away from a fight with industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This week it introduced Apollo, a stand-alone artificial intelligence piece its CEO claims is well ahead of its well-heeled competitors — and it chose to announce this new product in the middle of… 
Egnyte announced today that moving forward, it would be using Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud partner. While it would continue to support other cloud vendors like market leader AWS, it likely means that the company sees the best way to succeed inside the Azure ecosystem.