Mike Vizard

Although professional project managers might look askance at either Slack or Trello as tools for managing complex projects, the fact remains end users are organizing tasks within projects using these tools every day the week.   Technically, Slack isn’t a project management tool at all. It’s a collaboration platform provided as a cloud service. Like […]

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many artificial intelligence (AI) projects are failing largely because the processes that organizations are trying to automate are generally not nearly as well understood as most IT and business leaders might think. To provide some assurance that AI can be applied to a process, Verint Systems this week […]

Salesforce today announced it is making it possible for administrators and developers alike to create custom artificial intelligence (AI) models using the company’s Einstein platform. In addition, Salesforce announced that customers can now embed analytics created using Einstein AI models into third-party applications such as supply chain and finance applications. Finally, along with a language […]

Not too long ago, any time an end user wanted to generate any type of report, they had to ask someone in the IT department to generate it. In the last several years, significant advances have been made toward democratizing business intelligence (BI), thanks mainly to Tableau Software and Microsoft Power BI. In fact, the […]

Looker this week extended its campaign to add versions of its analytics applications targeted at specific types of users with the beta release of Looker for Sales Analytics. Aimed at sales teams, this latest iteration of the Looker offering complements versions targeted at digital marketers and web site managers that are now both generally available. […]

Salesforce has spent the last 20 years building a $13 billion company, largely on the back of a CRM application delivered as a cloud service. In its most recent financial guidance, Salesforce forecasts it expects to achieve $16 billion in revenue next year, and within the next four years will be able to generate annual […]

Oracle, for as long as anyone in IT can remember, has always trailed Salesforce when it comes to providing the best CRM software, even after Oracle acquired Siebel, the pioneer of the category, in 2005. But in the last two years, Oracle has closed the gap considerably, not so much by focusing on specific CRM […]

When it comes to anything that is free, there’s a natural tendency to assume some key feature has been hobbled or is missing altogether. In the case of the free CRM application offered by HubSpot, it turns out that the number of limitations is surprisingly few. HubSpot CRM may not meet the needs of a […]

Customer relationship management (CRM) applications have moved beyond being tactical tools for managing sales to become the primary means through which many organizations manage customer experience. The issue most organizations face today is not so much recognizing the business value of CRM applications, but rather rightsizing the level of investment to the size and scope […]

Salesforce is continuing its campaign to automate customer service tasks by injecting both artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and enhanced collaboration capabilities into its Service Cloud platform. Martha Walchuk, senior director of product marketing for Service Cloud, says a forthcoming instance of Service Cloud will add additional capabilities such as reply recommendations, article recommendations, next best […]

At the Adobe Summit 2019 conference, Adobe announced that it has extended the reach of the Adobe Experience Cloud by adding capabilities developed by both Adobe as well as strategic partners such as ServiceNow and Microsoft. Check Out Our 2019 Guide to the Best CRM Software.  Now generally available, Adobe Experience Platform is a Big […]

As part of an ongoing effort to make business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications more accessible, SAP at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit announced that is has added support for natural language queries and “smart discovery” of patterns to SAP Analytics Cloud. Nic Smith, global vice president of product marketing for Cloud Analytics at […]