David Needle

What’s new in CRM? There’s quite a lot, judging by a flurry of product news released by Salesforce.com and other providers of customer relationship management systems. But Outreach, a provider of sales analytics and related tools, says new features and new CRM tools haven’t fundamentally changed the challenge of using them efficiently. “The way reps […]

Informatica was at the big Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week showing off two services it says will make cloud-based apps work more effectively. Informatica Cloud Data Quality Radar for Salesforce is designed specifically for the Salesforce’s CRM software-as a service (SaaS) platform, but Informatica’s vision is to deploy versions that work on […]

SAN FRANCISCO—This week’s annual Dreamforce conference was the coming-out party for Salesforce Einstein, the artificial intelligence technology the company is embedding in customer relationship applications. Previewed last month, Salesforce Einstein is designed to give users of the company’s cloud CRM platform quick customer insights and predictive capabilities about such things as best sales prospects, hottest […]

Anyone in sales will tell you the prospects are out there, but successfully converting them to customers isn’t just a question of making a great sales pitch— it’s also about identifying the right person to sell to. That’s the basic premise of DemandBase, a B2B leader in the emerging field of account-based marketing. “We help […]

More than 160,000 people are expected to attend Dreamforce next week, the annual Salesforce conference in San Francisco. With those kinds of numbers and millions of users, it’s hard to argue the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software is anything but popular. But perhaps the huge interest in the conference is also an indication that […]

SAN FRANCISCO—High tech incubators have been around a long time, but Salesforce.com has added a few significant wrinkles that seem well-suited to its goal of expanding its Customer Relationship Management ecosystem. Salesforce hosted a kind of open house for the 14 startups that just moved into the incubator space earlier this week. The incubator is […]

Consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to where and how they buy things. Whether they are at home shopping on the internet, using mobile devices to enter mail orders or making old-fashioned in-store purchases, they have a lot of shopping options. But for vendors, it can be tricky to figure out what’s […]

Computers, mobile devices and smart sensors are generating trillions of pieces of data around the world at an unprecedented rate. Tiny sensors collect soil data for farmers, wearable devices accumulate data about our health, scanners track consumer purchases. The list of data sources goes on and on. But how much of all that data is […]

Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison didn’t mince words during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote Sept. 20 when he said his company is in a perfect position to take down Amazon Web Services as the top cloud infrastructure provider. In fact, the Oracle co-founder didn’t hold back much of anything in his withering critique of the cloud […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle kicked off its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Sept. 19 with news of a major artificial intelligence initiative that enables enterprise cloud applications to “learn” as they gather new data. The news comes at a time of growing interest in AI. Just this week, Oracle competitor Salesforce.com stole a bit of Oracle’s […]