by twieberneit | Sep 15, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
Will ByteDance be able to sell some of its non-Chinese TikTok business or not? TikTok, the app that is all the rage with millenials who post thirty second movie clips and seem to have tremendous fun with it. And which got valued at more than $ 50 bn US before it was threatened with a ban in the US. It is less than a week to the deadline for an enforced shut down of the infrastructure. Time to jot down a number of seemingly, but not so random thoughts. Microsoft, in combination with Walmart, and Oracle, along with some unnamed additional investors, appear to be the frontrunners for making a deal. There are rumours about at least Twitter and Netflix showing some interest, too. If they are allowed to make a deal, and then willing to make it given the boundaries that are set by both, the US and the Chinese governments. There is tremendous pressure exerted by the US government citing a threat to national security because it could provide data about US users to China. This would make it necessary to ban the app in the USA if the US business stays under Chinese control. India already banned the app back in June 2020. China, in turn, updated its export control rules, restricting the export of “technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services” (login required). This is pretty much exactly what TikTok does. This means that the sale of technologies that are implemented by TikTok are now subject to ByteDance as the owner of TikTok getting a governmental approval. It is not unreasonable to...
by twieberneit | Sep 13, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 10, 2020 Zoho announced Zoho Workplace, a new cloud based product bundle that is targeted at making a workforce more effective and efficient by bundling collaboration, productivity, and communication tools into one integrated set. As a part of this release Zoho enriched the applications that are part of Zoho Workplace with additional capabilities, following the vision of driving better business outcomes easier. Zoho Workplace consists of nine tightly integrated applications that are built on a common data model and that share a common dashboard and AI based enterprise search. The bundle is “centered around a full-featured business mail and office suite”. The nine applications Zoho Workplace consists of, are: Mail for business e-mail Cliq, as a messaging system Meeting for online conferencing Connect, a social intranet solution Writer for word processing Show for collaborative presenting Sheet for spreadsheets Workdrive as the cloud based document management system ShowTime for online training and/or webinars. Zoho did a study together with Beagle Research on what the main issues with current collaboration and productivity tools are. Results of this study include that applications that employees work with are “not intuitive and difficult to integrate”. Additional findings include that businesses often use different technology stacks which hampers productivity. Instead, they want “unified solutions that streamline complex processes”. Zoho Workplace is addressing this and as a result has seen a rapid adoption, “now supporting 2 million organizations, with 15 million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft”. The Bigger Picture...
by twieberneit | Sep 4, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 1, 2020 Salesforce announced its next round of updates to its Field Service Management solution. Eric Jacobson, Salesforce VP Product Management, Field Service and Gary Brandeleer, Senior Director Product Management, Field Service gave me an interesting briefing and demo beforehand. The new releases are all about efficient processing of the engagement throughout the whole process. In detail they are about Dynamic job scheduling Using Einstein Recommendation Builder to ensure that service technicians have the right spare parts available Asset management capabilities that allow companies a detailed view into the installed base at their customers. This is developed in cooperation with ServiceMax Improvements to the appointment assistant to provide as accurate as possible information to the customer about the arrival time of the service technician. The various features shall be made generally available through the next 6 months; as this is a forward looking statement, this may be subject to change. For your convenience, find the complete announcement below. Introducing the Next Generation of Field Service at Salesforce: AI-Powered Tools for Trusted, Mission-Critical Field Service By Mark Cattini, SVP of Field Service Management Today we are announcing the next generation of Salesforce Field Service, equipping teams across industries with AI-powered tools to deliver trusted, mission-critical field service. Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce Field Service includes new appointment scheduling and optimization capabilities, AI-driven guidance for dispatchers, asset performance insights and automated customer communications, all of which help ensure jobs are completed the first time, on time, every time. When the pandemic first hit, many industries that send employees out to complete jobs in the field...
by twieberneit | Aug 25, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On Monday, August 24th, 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 almost exclusively on Node data. According to Charlton and Green, SugarCRM itself also does not see any personally identifiable data (PII) but only meta data out of the Node system. One core idea behind the acquisition is that superior business outcomes need a combination of internal and external data. As Paul Greenberg gets quoted in the press release “now more than ever it is critical to leverage all available data and signals to work towards better outcomes for both customers and the business alike”. SugarCRM compares the result of combining CRM data with the data and intelligence provided by Node to the switch from a low fidelity to a high definition view on the...
by twieberneit | Aug 23, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Intercom is a conversational relationship platform that helps businesses build better customer relationships 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 twenty plus new features in this release cover enhancements across Messenger, Inbox and reporting. As part of this, there are new bots that can be used in the messenger, new data attributes that conversations can be tagged with and new rules and assignment features that enable deeper automation of conversations. This gets augmented by additional view capabilities in the support inbox that help getting better overview and by offering more task bots to the messenger that help providing a high customer experience while automating jobs. Additionally, Intercom improved its reporting capabilities by adding three dashboards covering conversations, effectiveness, and team resolutions with twelve new metrics plus improved filtering capabilities. Lastly, Intercom changed the side-bar navigation by providing clearer icons, changing their sequence and renaming one of the core sections, Platform, to Contacts. This has the goal of improving...
by twieberneit | Aug 5, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
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 (observability), and incidents (applied intelligence). For your convenience, you can read the press release – minus some quotes – right here: New Relic Delivers Reimagined Observability Platform with Unified User Experience, and Simplified, Predictable Pricing to Bring Value to Engineering Teams Introduces consumption pricing model that’s easy to manage — the end of host-based pricing SAN FRANCISCO – July 30, 2020 – New Relic, Inc. (NYSE: NEWR), the observability platform company, today delivered strategic updates to New Relic One [ADD LINK]. In a video to customers [ADD LINK], New Relic CEO and Founder Lew Cirne introduced a reimagined New Relic One, including a unified, intuitive user experience, new simple, predictable packaging and pricing, and a new perpetual free tier to make it easy for developers to try,...
