by twieberneit | Oct 19, 2021 | Analysis, Blog, Sponsored |
Zoho is a privately-owned technology company that was founded in 1996 as Adventnet, Inc. and has quietly evolved into an ambitious global player that serves the SMB and enterprise markets with cloud applications. The company offers a suite of more than 50 business, collaboration and productivity applications. These include applications for CRM, project management, finance, human resource management, analytics and support. The company is headquartered in Chennai, India. It has eleven offices in India, five in the United States and has offices in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Singapore, China, Egypt, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands. Offices in France and Germany are in preparation. Zoho has more than 10,000employees as of mid-2021. It is present in 180 countries with more than 70 million users. Zoho is led by its co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu. Being a privately held company, Zoho is not obliged to, and does not publish revenue or profit numbers. However, the company indicates a track record of profitable growth that is well in the double digits. The company manages its growth organically, i.e. without acquisitions. All applications are built by Zoho, using one single hard- and software stack. They are deployed and delivered via Zoho owned data centers in the United States, Europe, India, China and Australia. Following this unique approach, the company has built a solid platform with a unified data model that allows it to grow and deliver software at high speed. Core values of Zoho include corporate self-determination, privacy as a principle and a commitment to delivering high value. Zoho One Zoho aspires to deliver the operating system of a business with the goal of driving customers’ margins by unifying business operations on one single technology platform. The most important part...
by twieberneit | Sep 25, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 20, 2021 Oracle announced during an Oracle Live event named “The future of CRM” Oracle Fusion Marketing, which is not the same as Oracle Marketing. According to Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, Oracle Fusion Marketing is a layer that automatically executes account based marketing and sales campaigns. The product aims at enabling an end-to-end process from creating a marketing campaign to closing the sale, bridging the divide between marketing and sales. It does so by combining services that are delivered by three products: Unity, Oracle‘s Customer Data PlatformFusion Advertising, Oracle‘s digital advertisement platformFusion Products & References, Oracle‘s recommendation platform under one easy-to-use user interface that is modeled as a guided procedure. Oracle Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing by Building a target audience of known contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM systemExpanding your audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign – byt unknown to your contact databaseIdentifying the best customer references: based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaignSimplifying campaign configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channelsLaunching the campaign: the marketer can easily set up advertising budget, star and...
by twieberneit | Jul 23, 2021 | Analysis, Blog, News |
The News On July 18, 2021, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced the acquisition of Five9, Inc. in an all-shares transaction. The transaction values Five9 at around $14.7 billion. According to the press release “the acquisition is expected to help enhance Zoom’s presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth opportunity by adding the $24 billion contact center market.” According to Eric S. Yuan, CEO and founder of Zoom, the company is “continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers”. He continues with “enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers”. Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9 adds that “businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centers, but still struggle to deliver a seamless experience for their customers”. Trollope will become a president of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9. Zoom expects the acquisition of Five9 to be “complementary to the growing popularity of its Zoom Phone offering […] The combination of both firms also offers both companies significant cross-selling opportunities to each other’s respective customer bases”. As especially Rowan Trollope emphasizes upon repeatedly in the acquisition briefing, this acquisition is about accelerating growth by combining the respective assets, software as well as customers. The bigger picture The trend towards call centers in the cloud has been there before and it has been amplified with the Covid pandemic. Connecting...
by twieberneit | Jul 1, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |
I haven’t written much about Nimble recently; actually I haven’t written too much about anything lately. Now it is time to have a look into some interesting news that hit my desktop. The News On June 30, 2021, Nimble announced an integration with Microsoft Teams to streamline workspace collaboration. The integration offers Nimble users to prepare meetings and provides the tools to help getting information on meeting participants from their contact records, the ability to take notes that will be synched to Nimble as well as the ability to send trackable follow-up emails. The capability will be delivered via an add-in to MS Teams. For your convenience, the press release is also copied below. Nimble Integrates with Microsoft Teams to Power Virtual Business Meeting Engagements Nimble Offers Microsoft Teams Add-in to Help Teams Thrive in The Hybrid Workspace SANTA MONICA, Calif. — June 30, 2021 — Nimble, the simple CRM for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace teams, announced today that they have integrated with Microsoft Teams to give teams a shared view of every customer, and to streamline collaboration between teams. Improve Collaboration and Build Better Customer Relationships Customer data is the most important asset for every organization. The success of every customer relationship management application lies in the data accuracy. Business owners and professionals rely on Nimble to offer a 360 view into the relationships with their customers. Integrating with collaboration applications and seamless synchronization of information and the history of conversations is crucial to improving customer relationships and team productivity. “Our customers rely on Microsoft Teams to work effectively across their organizations and to build and nurture...
by twieberneit | Mar 3, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |
The 2021 Zoho analyst day certainly was different. Different not only because it was not an offline but an online event but in the way it was prepared and conducted. Apparently, the team around Sandra Lo has taken up quite some lessons that other events had to learn, too. This is kind of the advantage one has not being the first one in a season. But this was only one part of it. The second part is that the whole event was run using Zoho software, in particular Zoho Backstage and Zoho Meeting. Overall, there have been some 150 attendees with what I assume, very different levels of knowledge about Zoho. The event In contrast to most other analyst events, this one required actual preparation, as product and roadmap topics have been sent out beforehand for self-study – and were kind of “required reading”. Going through all videos at least once was an exercise that lasted more than five hours. The event itself was split into two days of two and a half hours each, covering topics from corporate responsibility via status up to roadmap topics. Day one started with a corporate presentation, the past 25 years and a view into the next 25 years, based upon CEO Sridhar Vembu’s vision and the partly interrelated themes that he sees (and builds his company around): De-Layering the tech stack, which means that within the tech stack from chip level to business solutions that a company operates, less vendors will be neededExtreme financial bubbles that we have seen and will continue to seeThe emergence of self-reliant regional economies and the regionalization...
by twieberneit | Nov 26, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Today various media outlets broke the news that Salesforce is in advanced talks with Slack Technologies about a possible acquisition. The news had two effects: Slack stock went up nearly 40 per cent during trading hours while Salesforce stock loses out by 5 percent, which basically says that Salesforce investors are not so convinced about this acquisition being a good thing, whereas Slack investors clearly are. Slack and Salesforce share an integration, which is listed on appexchange since 2019. There have been speculations on Slack being a good target for Salesforce that date back till August 2016, basically ever since the integration between Salesforce and Slack got announced. The Bigger Picture There are several aspects to this news. Salesforce already has Chatter, a tool that often gets negative feedback. The company also owns Quip, which is essentially a solution for the collaborative creation of documents and spreadsheets. And Salesforce has created work.com, as a solution to increase business resiliency and to improve collaborative work. On a larger scale, and accelerated by the Covid crisis, the need for fast and efficient communication and collaboration of distributed work forces and their customers, using various means of communication is there. Actually, it has been there for quite some time, as the emergence of solutions from Slack to Teams, Zoom, etc. proves. E-mail is still very important, but only a part of this communication, which includes near instant chat, voice and video communications as well as collaborative work on documents – inside and outside an organization. Another part is, that this communication needs to be tied to business processes and enable...
