aheadCRM

  The News On Monday, August 24 th , 2020 SugarCRM announced the acquisition of node.io . I had the pleasure to get pre-briefed by Craig Charlton , CEO SugarCRM and Rich Green , Chief Product Officer and CTO SugarCRM about this topic. Node was founded in 2014 with significant expertise , including ex-Google personnel and he creator of the Alta-Vista search engine.  According to Crunchbase , the company has acquired $43.5M US to innovate around AI as a service. The company applies deep learning to help organizations make better predictions and decisions that impact their bottom line and focuses on delivering accurate predictions even with minimum CRM data. It does this by taking advantage of large data sets that it acquired or has free access to, including company and available business related personal information. That way, it is possible to hand over only a limited amount of SugarCRM data to Node in order to achieve accurate predictions. Instead, the prediction engine runs...

In this episode Ralf Korb and I talked with our guests Ray Gerber , Chief Solutions Officer at Thunderhead and Andre Mayer, Sales DACH Thunderhead about the past and future of customer journey orchestration, the importance of thinking outside-in by providing the ability to create customer managed journey via touch points and real time personalisation at scale.  Interested in learning how customer journey orchestration, marketing automation, and customer data platforms play together?  Or where the future of customer journey orchestration lies? Ray has the answer, and he explains it well. He also has some interesting words about partnerships, with Salesforce and other tier one players. Note: The first 15 minutes or so are in German, then we continue in English.  

  The News Intercom is a conversational relationship platform that helps businesses build better customer relationsh ips through personalized, messenger based experiences. It’s the only platform that delivers conversational experiences across the customer journey, with solutions for conversational marketing, conversational customer engagement and conversational support. Intercom is bringing a messenger-first experience to all business-to-customer communication, powering 500 million conversations per month and connecting 4 billion unique end users worldwide across its more than 30,000 paying customers, including Atlassian, Sotheby’s and New Relic. On August 12, 2020 Intercom launched a new product release with more than twenty functional enhancement that are intended to ‘supercharge customer support’. The company says that it is its biggest ever launch and targeted at ensuring that its customers “can provide prompt, personal support without sacrificing power or efficiency”. The twe...

The News On July 30, New Relic announced the delivery of its new Observability Platform, New Relic One. The platform has been redeveloped (‘reimagined’) to be more simple and integrated while retaining the power it already offered. New Relic One offers three core modules: ·       A highly scalable telemetry data platform as the single source of truth of all operational data. It collects and visualizes data and creates alerts on application and infrastructure data ·       Full stack observability that enables the analysis and troubleshooting of the complete software stack, including IaaS ·       Applied intelligence to detect, understand and resolve incidents, ideally before they even happen. These modules are offered with a perpetually free tier. Once the quotas of the free tier are exceeded, New Relic offers the solution in a pricing model based upon amount of data (telemetry data platform), seats (observabilit...

The News On July 26, 2020, not two years after announcing the acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP announced its intent to take Qualtrics public . The timeline is yet to be communicated. What the press release basically says is that SAP’s cloud growth, including Qualtics was a ‘great success’. SAP itself wants to remain in control by keeping a majority stake in Qualtrics after the spin-off while Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith wants to be the ‘largest independent shareholder’. SAP insists in it being fully committed to the Qualtrics XM platform as a key element of its Intelligent Enterprise strategy, but with Qualtrics being a part of the SAP ecosystem instead of being a part of SAP itself. For your convenience the full press release is quoted here. WALLDORF  —  SAP SE  (NYSE: SAP) today announced its intent to take Qualtrics public through an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States. Qualtrics is the market leader and creator of the Experience Ma...

The news It is reporting season – and I am actually already somewhat late to have a look at Salesforce’s Q1 figures of fiscal year 20/21 and to think about some implications. The earnings presentation makes for an interesting overview, more details are in the quarterly filing , the earnings release , and the transcript of the earnings webcast . So, let’s get into it and look at some figures, concentrating on the company overview, result highlights, revenue and margin developments, revenues by cloud and region. Right on the first content page Salesforce states that it -        Is #1 CRM software provider worldwide -        Consistently delivers durable revenue growth -        Is the fastest growing top five enterprise software company -        Is uniquely positioned to help customer drive broad-based digital transformation Revenue is up 31 per cent (at constant curren...

For quite some time the SAP CX community asks itself where SAP is going, or more precisely, which direction its Customer Experience portfolio is taking. This is a worrisome question, particularly as the larger CRM market is estimated to be the biggest segment of the enterprise software market since 2018; and since SAP is positioned with a number of strong solutions, partly home-grown and partly acquired. Hybris, Gigya, CallidusCloud, Qualtrics are only the shiniest catches of the acquisition spree that SAP took under Bill McDermott’s leadership. In September 2015 SAP announced that it set out to build an integrated suite of front office solutions, which the company declared delivered during SAPPHIRE 2018, which also marked the birth of the ‘intelligent enterprise’ . These two announcements can basically be summed up as take the CRM market from its strength on the ERP and supply chain side. In between, SAP imported important parts of its CRM 7 solution into its new S/4HANA solution A...