Sunday December 22, 2024

Samanage raises $20M and makes enterprise play with new Salesforce integration

 Samanage, makers of customer service software in the cloud, had a couple of major announcements today. For starters, they got a $20 million investment, and they also announced a major step: the launch of their enterprise product on the Salesforce platform. Let’s start with the funding. The round included money from Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel […]

Salesforce acquires Sequence to build out its UX design services

 Salesforce has made another acquisition that underscores how the CRM and cloud software giant is looking to sell more services to its customers that complement the software they are already buying. It has acquired Sequence, a user experience design agency based out of San Francisco and New York that works with brands like Best Buy, Peets, Apple, Google and many […]

Salesforce opens engineering office in Microsoft’s and Amazon’s backyards

 Salesforce announced today that it plans to open an engineering and innovation hub in the Seattle area, greatly expanding its presence there. Company co-founder Parker Harris says the office, which is located in the Nine Two Nine Office Tower in Bellevue, will be dedicated mostly to supporting the company’s artificial intelligence initiative, introduced last Fall, which… Read More Tweet […]

Salesforce asserted itself in 2016

 Salesforce has always liked to think of itself as an industry irritant, the company that was bucking the status quo and making the established players feel uncomfortable. But this year as the cloud mainstreamed and Salesforce took off on a $10 billion run rate, you couldn’t help but feel that after 17 years in business, […]

Salesforce LiveMessage brings messaging to Service Cloud

 As more and more people use SMS and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to interact with friends, it’s only logical that they want to interact with business that way too — and today Salesforce launched LiveMessage, a tool that helps customer service reps manage messaging traffic just like any customer interactions in Service Cloud. For starters, it […]

Salesforce looks surprisingly good headed into the end of the year with a strong Q3

 Despite a weak second quarter and a lot of eyes on the end of the year, Salesforce is already starting to look pretty good again to Wall Street. The company beat analyst expectations today in its third-quarter earnings report across the board. Salesforce reported earnings of 24 cents per share on revenue of $2.14 billion. […]

Salesforce looks to the future with Einstein artificial intelligence

 Salesforce has a history of staying close to the cutting edge of technology, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it announced an artificial intelligence initiative recently, it dubbed Einstein. We caught up with some key members of the Einstein team at Dreamforce earlier this month and asked them to explain the new technology for us. Einstein isn’t […]

Salesforce took a horizontal turn when it bought Quip

 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 concentrate on more vertical targets. In fact, at a press conference this week at Dreamforce, Salesforce president, vice chairman and COO — yes, he has all those titles — said when […]

Zenefits makes licensing compliance app available for free in the Salesforce App Exchange

 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 […]

Kustomer, founded by Salesforce alums, nabs $12.5M to repair customer care

 The need to contact customer support is the bane of many a modern consumer’s existence: not only is it likely that you are doing it because you have a problem that needs fixing, but you are inevitably sucked into a vortex where you have to sit on the phone for ages (or wait in stasis for emailed […]