David Needle

Aiming to boost the development and faster deployment of mobile applications for business, Salesforce.com has announced a new set of do-it-yourself tools and services collectively referred to as Lightning Platform Mobile. There are three major parts to the Lightning Platform Mobile: Mobile Builders, Mobile Services and an all-new feature called Mobile Publisher. With Mobile Publisher, […]

Looking to make a splash at the big National Retail Federation conference in New York City on Jan. 14, Salesforce previewed a major update to its Commerce Cloud platform set for general availability in the first half of this year. A beta version of the service is now available. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform includes […]

Voice access, HyperIntelligence and new mobility features marked the release of MicroStrategy 2019, the newest version of the venerable business intelligence and analytics platform. Included in the Jan. 7 release are HyperIntelligence features companies can use to tap more than 200 enterprise data sources, including web applications, Salesforce and Office 365. MicroStrategy uses the term […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Fast-growing chipmaker Nvidia demonstrated its new Xavier Module to media members and others here at company headquarters on Dec. 12. The event also featured dozens of developers already building systems using Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit. The Xavier Module is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet it […]

Companies interested in doing more with Lightning, the Salesforce application framework that underpins its customer relationship management platform, suddenly have a lot more options. On Dec. 13, Salesforce.com announced plans to let developers use JavaScript to create Lightning Web Components. Previously, Lightning developers were limited to Salesforce’s own, less widely used Aura programming model to […]

Salesforce said its latest offering will help field service agents better serve customers by leveraging internet of things data to get better information as to when products in use need servicing or replacement. The new Salesforce IoT Insights, released on Dec. 5, also overlays IoT data with customer relationship management (CRM) data so both the […]

Business productivity software maker Citrix announced the purchase of micro apps provider Sapho Nov. 15 in a move that both companies said is a great fit. “As a startup we were focused on one thing, but customers want better analytics and workflow, and putting us together is a no-brainer,” Fouad ElNaggar, co-founder and CEO of […]

Among the many new features in ThoughtSpot 5 is a new voice-driven analytics engine called SearchIQ. The analytics software maker said the latest version, unveiled Nov. 14 at the company’s user conference, lets people use their own voice and “casual language” to ask the system to analyze data from customers and a wide range of […]

Customer-support software provider Zendesk is moving upstream with a new CRM offering called Zendesk Sunshine revealed Nov. 13 at the company’s Relate2018 conference. Zendesk is banking on a few points of differentiation to give it a competitive edge, including the fact that Zendesk Sunshine was developed in the cloud—specifically, in Amazon Web Services. “It’s clear […]

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.—There isn’t much if any dispute that artificial intelligence will eliminate certain types of jobs done by humans, but experts here at the Techonomy conference Nov. 12 said the threat and solutions aren’t well-understood. “We see AI changing 90 percent of the work people do, and we think most companies are behind […]