Cloud Computing

Smart home and consumer IoT solutions promise significant opportunities for the insurance industry to reduce costs, alleviate risks, deepen customer engagement, and create new services and revenue streams. There are many barriers ahead, but given the tremendous upside, insurance companies have begun...

After nearly a decade of company building, Zuora last week went public, valuing itself on the open market at roughly US$2 billion after gaining 43 percent on its first day of trading. Those outlines don't reveal the importance of Zuora generally, and subscription billing systems in particular, to th...

Anyone who has attempted to adopt Salesforce cloud solutions in an enterprise environment knows that it may not be as easy as expected because of the additional effort typically required to integrate various data sources. This is a common problem that has plagued the enterprise application industry ...

Accent Technologies has announced the release of its new CRM Supercharger application, which guides selling and sales performance by applying intelligent data analytics to sales and buyer engagement data. Like all of Accent's products, the Supercharger application is based on the Software as a Servi...

Salesforce has launched Salesforce Essentials, a collection of intelligent apps targeting SMBs. Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials offers a consumer-like experience optimized for any device. Relevant information is displayed on one unified console, and Lightning enables drag-and...

Amazon has agreed to buy smart doorbell maker Ring for $1 billion, the companies have disclosed. Ring users already could use the Echo Show to see and hear visitors at the front door. The deal means Ring will be able to further its "mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods by providing effective yet...

We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to make healthcare more affordable and to ensure better outcomes. Too often, the upshot is to reduce all problems and challenges to a singularity in search of a silver bullet. It never works, but it seems like human nature to take that approach. Salesf...

Oracle has demonstrated artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in the Oracle Cloud Platform at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. Autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled for availability in ...

Microsoft has announced a plan to use blockchain technology to develop decentralized identities, or DIDs, supported by Microsoft Authenticator. Microsoft formally joined the ID2020 Alliance last month as a founding member. The Alliance aims to develop a blockchain-based identity system for vulnerabl...

As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the cloud to keep pace. This means revamping their transportation and logistics systems to meet their customers' escalating delivery expectations. Thes...

SAP this week announced it would acquire long-term partner Callidus Software for about $2.4 billion to improve back-office to front-office links. The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2018, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. SAP will get Calli...

Partnerships may be playing the role usually reserved for merger and acquisition activity in the CRM world right now. Generally a company makes a purchase when it wants to capture the benefits of another business' R&D or established market base. However, at the moment it appears that the desirab...

Oracle's race to the cloud has offered multiple successes to its investors and some disappointment as well. No transition of this magnitude can be expected to run like clockwork, but the difference between revenues for Oracle's SaaS apps for last quarter, $1.1 billion, and those for its IaaS apps, a...

Google on Wednesday released its Cloud AutoML Vision service in Alpha. It is the first in a planned series of Cloud AutoML services designed to help people with limited machine learning expertise build their own custom models using advanced techniques such as learning2learn and transfer learning. Le...