Trends

There will be little New Year's Eve celebrating but perhaps a lot of morning-after hangovers for U.S. businesses that haven't begun preparing for ASC 606, the Financial Accounting Standards Board's new rules about revenue recognition. They are set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2018. The change is har...

Salesforce is a large and well-disciplined development company. It's pretty good at marketing too. It continues to innovate in all product areas, from core platform to applications, and the one criticism I'd make is that it's information overload at times. Lately Salesforce has made a big deal of ad...

Music can enhance the customer experience even in nontraditional retail environments, suggests a study released Thursday by Mood Media and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers. The study was conducted in France. Customers had a more favorable experience in five business locations -...

I spent last week at Oracle's customer event, OpenWorld 2017, in San Francisco. When I wasn't drinking from an information fire hose, it was alternately fascinating and exhausting. There were major announcements in database, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and other stuff I'm ass...

Digital Hub is not a new idea. It's been percolating for a few years, and its roots can be traced to Dublin, Ireland, where in a cluster of eight buildings, there exists what might be the original hub. In Dublin, it's made up of 97 companies employing 725 people, and it was given a jumpstart by the ...

When Salesforce unveiled sales forecasting with its AI tool, Einstein, my immediate reaction was that it should have tried something easier -- like solving global warming. A sales forecast that bears some resemblance to reality has been a grail quest for all of us for many years, and Salesforce is n...

Oracle showed some very good numbers in its latest earnings announcement. As it begins its second year of aggressive cloud promotion, the company overall is showing significant year-over-year improvements, thanks to its turn to cloud infrastructure, applications and platforms. Yet when read right, t...

InsideView last week released InsideView Target with ABM, a tool for business-to-business companies that have implemented account-based marketing. It is a fully redesigned version of InsideView Target, with the addition of ABM workflows and other enhancements. "Companies who want to [succeed] with A...

Four Quadrant this week released its Marketing Automation Buyer's Checklist for companies seeking to purchase a B2B marketing automation platform, or MAP. The checklist has eight major categories for evaluation and more than 35 subcategories. It lists more than 100 questions buyers should ask to mak...

Oracle will announce its Q1 revenue and profit numbers after market close on Wednesday. There's more than a little excitement about what might be revealed, specifically if the company can continue its rise, thanks to its cloud products. The anticipated answer is yes, for a number of reasons, but the...

Many businesses still don't use configure, price, quote software in their routine sales processes. Maybe they don't need it, but for businesses that still cling to spreadsheet-based approaches to track things like price lists and product catalogs, chances are good that they're dealing with more over...

The enterprise SaaS market grew 31 percent year over year, totaling almost $15 billion in revenue in Q2 2017, according to Synergy Research. Collaboration was the highest growth segment. Microsoft is the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS revenues, having overtaken Salesforce a year ago. Micros...

Brick-and-mortar retailers have been finding it difficult to offer pricing that's competitive with e-commerce sites, which have the advantage of massive scope and scale, according to a new Frost & Sullivan report. E-commerce will account for nearly 18 percent of the total retail market by 2025, ...