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A lot of people might have thought Oracle's announcement of the autonomous database at last year's OpenWorld and its subsequent release earlier this year were the whole story, but there's a lot more, and this week's webcast featuring Larry Ellison was proof. Ellison must find his CTO role -- since h...

There are many interpretations of Salesforce's elevation of Keith Block to serve as co-CEO with Marc Benioff. Block has been the company's vice chairman and president for several years, and the elevation simply could be a recognition of the obvious -- he's been doing the job without the title for a ...

Social is nearing the end of its "hypecycle." During that early phase, an innovation is seen as everything from a cancer cure to free lunch. Most of the claims prove baseless, but then something curious happens. Users take another look and discover some things that the innovation is a perfect fit fo...

Looking to raise capital, launch a product, and grow your business? Crowdfunding could be the answer. "Crowdfunding is more than just the money," remarked Justin Giddings, CEO of The Kickstarter Guy. "In some ways, it is the perfect laboratory to explore and develop the market viability of your proj...

Worldwide spending on blockchain will hit $1.5 billion this year -- twice as much as in 2017 -- and it will total nearly $12 billion in 2022, according to IDC. The technology is expected to have a five-year compound annual growth rate of 73.2 percent. Cross-business collaboration and interoperabilit...

The ability to collect massive amounts of data represented a huge leap forward in customer service and communication when customer relationship management first hit the market as a marketing, sales and data management tool. However, CRMs aren't a holy grail. Data management is one thing. Using data ...

Supermarket uber-chain The Kroger Co. has launched Kroger Ship, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform. Ship debuted in four markets: Cincinnati; Houston; Louisville, Kentucky; and Nashville, Tennessee. The service will be rolled out to additional markets over the next few months. During the firs...

Freshworks has secured $100 million in funding from Accel and Sequoia Capital India with the participation of CapitalG. That brings the total amount of capital raised since the firm's 2010 launch to $250 million. CapitalG, Sequoia and Access all participated in previous rounds of funding.

CRM could be tainted by the failings of social media and the bad actors who exploited social platforms. Today it seems especially important for CRM to separate itself from the worst aspects of social to the extent that we can. There's certainly a lot to say -- from continuing to talk about the care ...

IBM and currency trading utility CLS have announced a new platform that enables financial institutions to deploy, share and consume services on a hosted blockchain network. Nine financial institutions, including Barclays and Citibank, have agreed to participate in the initial launch of the platform,...

The FIRE methodology is designed to unite and simplify the goals of sales and marketing teams. FIRE stands for Fit, Intent, Recency, and Engagement.

A confusing dynamic has emerged in the software industry caused by the inexorable shift to the cloud. Even before you can get into the analysis, though, you need to identify which cloud(s) you're thinking about -- e.g., infrastructure, apps, platform.

Just think about how philanthropy has been changing at the instigation of Salesforce. From its earliest days, Salesforce has adhered to a 1,1,1 model of giving back to the community. It includes donating one percent each of employee's time, product and equity to charity.

Openprise has announced new partnerships and a new service designed to streamline marketing automation and ABM operations. The new partners offer capabilities such as reverse-IP lookup, business-to-personal-email address lookup, business data in the UK, and more in-depth business-to-consumer and bus...