
Salesforce Fills Out the "Marketing Cloud"
Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire email marketing and marketing automation vendor ExactTarget for ~$2,5B or $33.75/share, ending a few years worth of speculation as to which marketing automation vendor it would eventually acquire. The leading contender up to last December was marketing automation heavyweight Eloqua, but Oracle ended that line of thinking by acquiring […]

Son of CRM: cloud sales, marketing and service in 2013
The name’s the same, but this is not the CRM your forefathers knew. Back in the client-server era, enterprise computing focused almost exclusively on automating internal systems. Today, all the innovation is happening at the edge of the enterprise, automating external interactions with prospects, customers, partners and more in the quest for what I’ve called […]

Will social software startups "collapse into the orbit" of the big vendors?
With Microsoft finally making a major acquisition move in social software, are we now seeing the roll up of the entire social business industry? Or is this just an minor story in a vast parade of change when it comes to how enterprises are moving to s…