SugarCRM supercharges its AI by acquiring Node.io
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...
Intercom takes on Zendesk
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...
New Relic invents APM – again
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,...
SAP takes Qualtrics public – Surprise, Surprise
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 Management (XM) category, a large, fast-growing and rapidly evolving market. SAP intends to remain the majority owner of Qualtrics. SAP’s primary objective for the IPO is to fortify Qualtrics’ ability to capture its full market potential within Experience Management. This will help to increase Qualtrics’ autonomy and enable it to expand its footprint both within SAP’s customer base and beyond. “SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said. “As Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to...