Category Archives: Salesforce

CRM, Europe, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Salesforce, startups

Salesforce offers $100m VC opportunity to European cloud startups

Salesforce WearSalesforce Ventures has allocated $100 million to invest in European startups as the investment arm of the cloud giant aims to capitalise on a potential $33.3 billion market. Any European cloud start up that impresses the venture capitalists could typically expect backing of between $1 million and $5 million, according to the fund’s development head.

As the investment arm of cloud-based CRM giant Salesforce it has already invested £500 million in 150 cloud and enterprise startups since 2009. However the majority of these have been US based and only 17 European cloud start up firms have been funded. However, researcher IDC predicts that the European cloud sector will grow 12 as fast as any other sector of the IT industry. As Europe catches up with the US, by 2019 its cloud market could be worth a collective $33.3 billion, it said.

As the global shift to the cloud generates demand for exciting new social, mobile and data science technologies it is creating an opportunity that should not be missed, said Salesforce EVP of corporate development John Somorjai. The European investment business will link back to Salesforce Ventures’ operations in the US run by Somorjai. London based Alex Kayyal will head the Salesforce Ventures’ efforts in Europe.

“There is so much incredible innovation happening in Europe today and we want to empower the next generation of enterprise cloud startups in the region,” said Somorjai, “Our $100 million commitment strengthens our mission to help startups grow and give back to their communities.”

However, he admitted that the competition has already started with five investments already earmarked to take a chunk of the budget.

European cloud start ups that have previously won funding from Salesforce Ventures include CartoDB, CloudSense, Cloud9 IDE, NewVoiceMedia, Qubit, Universal Avenue and YOUR SL. It’s not just about the money, according to Ruben Daniels, co-founder of Cloud9 IDE. “It’s the network and introductions, mentorship and framework that help,” said Daniels.

Salesforce Ventures’ global expertise was as important as its funding, according to CartoDB founder Javier de la Torre. “It helps us more effectively bring our data visualization tools to individual and business users around the world,” said de la Torre.

CloudSense, CRM, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Software as a service, Ziggo

Ziggo appoints CloudSense to boost its Salesforce

Money cloudPrice quote service provider CloudSense has been anointed by Dutch cableco Ziggo to boost sales using the Cloudsense Telecoms Platform.

The CloudSense systems integrate with Salesforce’s customer relationship management service to improve the effectiveness of company sales teams. The cloud based service helps employees to configure, price and quote products and services from simple sales of broadband to more sophisticated TV bundles and subscriptions.

In a competitive selection process CloudSense promised Ziggo higher order values, fewer order errors, more automation of sales processes and quicker product launches. CloudSense created a telecoms-specific Configure Price Quote (CPQ) and customer order management, according to Dave Loerts, Director Sales SMB at Ziggo. This means Ziggo can improve both the sales cycle and the customer experience. “We were impressed that CloudSense could offer CPQ across every sales channel,” said Loerts.

One of the deciding factors in the sale was that CloudSense has created a contingency plan for working when no network is available. “Being able to configure, price, quote and contract on an iPad offline means the team are always able to sell more effectively,” said Loerts.

The CloudSense Telecoms Platform brings together the sale and provisioning of the entire range of a mobile telcos’ or communications services provider’s products and services across every sales channel. It then integrates them and provides a single view of the full transactional lifecycle natively on Salesforce. By editing and simplifying the presentation of information, and prioritising the most crucial deal making intelligence, it saves time and speeds up the sales life cycle, CloudSense claims.

Faster quotes lead to more sales, which then creates more opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, according to CloudSense CEO Richard Britton.

“Many companies today are faced with challenges when it comes to selling on-site and over the phone, and CloudSense can have a significant impact on a company’s drive to grow its market share,” said Britton.

AWS, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Public Cloud, Salesforce, Software as a service, Synergy Research

Public cloud generating $22 billion a quarter for IT Companies

metalcloud_lowresPublic cloud computing generated over $22 billion in revenues for IT companies in the second financial quarter of 2015, according to a study by Synergy Research Group.

The revenue breaks down into $10 billion earned by companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data centre facilities and $12 billion being generated from selling infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.

In addition the public cloud supports ‘huge’ revenue streams from a variety of internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce platforms, says the report. It identifies the supply side companies with the biggest share of revenues as Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.

As the public cloud makes inroads into the total IT market, the hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 per cent of all data centre infrastructure spending. Public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 per cent of the data centre colocation market.

While the total IT market grew at less than five per cent per year, the growth of cloud revenues outpaced it. Infrastructure and platform as a service revenues (Iaas/Paas) grew by 49 per cent in the past year and software as a service (SaaS) grew by 29 per cent.

“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

However, the report noted that there is still a place for regional small-medium sized public cloud players.

Internet of Things, IoT, IoT cloud, M2M, Salesforce, Software as a service

Salesforce IoT Cloud promises to create meaning from M2M talk

Internet of Things flat iconic illustrationSalesforce has launched its Internet of Things (IoT) offering with IoT Cloud, which promises to convert machine to machine conversations, digital content and customer information into useful intelligence that sales staff can act on.

The IoT Cloud is powered by event processing engine Salesforce Thunder, which will allow customers to personalise the way they sell, service and market. Development partners include processor maker ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln.

The service was unveiled by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “Salesforce is turning the internet of things into the internet of customers,” said Benioff. The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create instant one-to-one proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, Benioff said.

According to Salesforce, its ‘massively scalable’ cloud computing architecture can ‘listen’ to the connected world and make sense of the billions of events each day from all sources. The connections with wearables, windmills, telephones and turbines – and all other devices – can be contextualized by Salesforce’s own real-time rules, it claims. The IoT Cloud aims to give business users intuitive, point-and-click tools to define rules and logic for events that can trigger actions among the users of Salesforce’s customer relationship systems.

The rationale is to glean information reported by devices – such as the numbers of hard braking movements by drivers of a car fleet – in order to monitor and manage customer cases. Machine intelligence, such as vehicle braking data, could help Salesforce users negotiate from a position of superior knowledge with their customers.

According to Salesforce’s figures there will be 75 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, with the volume of data growing exponentially each year. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that IoT applications have the potential to make $11.1 trillion worth of economic impact per year by 2025.

The challenge is to make sense of all that data, said IoT market watcher Gary Barnett, chief analyst at Ovum. “IoT deployments only bring value when organisations can act on the information their IoT networks generate,” said Barnett, chief analyst, Ovum. “The ability to make sense of that data will be a key factor in turning it into action.”

analytics as a service, app cloud, Big Data, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Software as a service

Salesforce boosts its Analytics Cloud intelligence tool

Analytics1Salesforce has added new options for users of its Analytics Cloud intelligence tool. The new ‘Wave Actions’ flash up crucial information on dashboards so that salespeople can act more incisively as crucial information reaches them faster.

The new features allow companies to create customised Wave Actions, such as creating cases, updating accounts or assigning tasks. Since Wave is natively integrated with App Cloud, the Wave Actions are automatically pushed from Wave into the corresponding Salesforce record. The system instantly identifies the type of problem that sales managers need to know about as soon as possible, according to Salesforce. When an account suffers particularly bad customer attrition, for example, a sales manager will be alerted to this pattern more rapidly. This is achieved by customising the Wave Analytics App to alert managers about patterns on sales figures (such as defecting customers) and enables them to take action more rapidly.

A new Wave Visualizations feature aims to create a consistent user experience and create a more intuitive process. Salesforce has also revamped the Analytics Cloud’s user interface in a bid to encourage users to become more adventurous in their creation of reports and dashboards. This, according to the cloud software vendor, will bring Analytics Cloud in line with the Lightning Experience design that was rolled out first for Salesforce’s Sales Cloud.

New information has also been unveiled about the use of the Analytics Cloud within the portfolio of other vendor’s software offerings. According to Salesforce there are 81 companies in the Analytics Cloud’s partner ecosystem, with 13 software companies scheduled to unveil new apps based on Analytics Cloud, including Apttus, FinancialForce, SteelBrick and Vlocity.

In its most recent earnings statement, Salesforce revealed that subscription and support revenues from Analytics Cloud were ‘not significant’ for the three and six months ending on July 31, 2015.

The addition to Analytics Cloud comes exactly one year after it was first launched. According to Salesforce, the upgrade gives Analytics Cloud a wider, more active remit than its existing role as a standalone business intelligence application.

health, health cloud, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce says its Health Cloud is about building relationships, not records

Salesforce has unveiled a new cloud based system aimed at helping clinicians to build stronger relationships with patients. The launch comes in the same week that UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to give patients in England access to their entire medical record by 2018, and to let them read and add to their GP record using their smartphone within a year.

Salesforce Health Cloud (SHC) is a cloud-based patient relationship manager that aims to give health service providers a more complete picture of each patient, by integrating data from electronic medical records, wearables and other sources, such as general practitioner and hospital notes.

The service was developed in the US, where recent legislation – such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – aims to put more emphasis on improving the patient experience. According to Salesforce, wearable technology has changed the way health services are administered and new cloud apps must cater for the new expectations of patients. The SHC is designed to meet the demands of a generation of digital natives that grew up with iPhones, Facebook and FitBits who expect to use technology to manage their care. According to Salesforce’s research, 71 per cent of  ‘millennials’ (those reaching adulthood around the year 2000) want their doctors to provide a mobile app to actively manage their health. Salesforce claims that 63 per cent of them want health data extracted from their wearables to be available to their doctors.

The Health Cloud was developed with input from a variety of US-based healthcare companies, including Centura Health, DJO Global, Radboud University Medical Center, Philips and the University of California and San Francisco. Development partners included Accenture, Deloitte Digital, PwC, MuleSoft and Persistent Systems, who collectively integrated records and customised content.

Features include a Patient Caregiver Map, which can map household relationships, as well as all providers and specialists involved in a patient’s care. A ‘Today’ screen alerts caregivers to timely issues, such as missed appointments or the need to refill medications. The logic of the system is that fewer patients will fall through the cracks in any health service, an issue that Salesforce Chatter – an internal social networking tool – aims to combat through a review process for internal health service conversations.

“The era of precision healthcare is upon us,” said Joshua Newman, Chief Medical Officer for Salesforce Healthcare and Life Sciences.

Apttus, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Cloud vendor Apttus raises $108m to fund new services and features

Cloud software vendor Apttus has raised a further $108 million to fund the growth of its quote and renewals management business.

The new investment comes only seven months after it secured $41m in February 2015, as investor confidence in its e-commerce, contract management and renewals management software has surged. Founded in 2006, it received its first series of investment funding in 2013, when it received $37 million.

The Series C funding round was led by KIA. Previous investment rounds have been led by Salesforce’s venture capital arm Salesforce Ventures, which also contributed to this round of investment. Investors in this latest round also included Iconiq Capital and K1 Capital.

The Apttus cloud systems integrate with Salesforce’s CRM platform and are used to develop sales and renewal quotes within Salesforce’s system.

The funds will be used to develop new systems and provide new services to Apttus customers and prospects. According to Apttus, the main targets will be in the manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and telecommunications industries.

Apttus aims to give clients a better system of demand management by giving its users more information about their clients. The intelligence it curates allows sales staff to identify and concentrate their efforts on the most likely sales prospects. This information is gathered by the system by assessing the online track record of the potential customer. By monitoring and managing every transaction, this system gives the seller an ‘unbroken funnel’ throughout the sales cycle. This channelling of the customer is known as the Quote-to-Cash process.

The Apttus system was built on the Salesforce1 platform and it claims to have been an active partner of Salesforce since its foundation in 2006, with participation in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Apttus has 70 customers in the Fortune 500 and is projected tohave 1,000 employees by the end of 2015, a 400% growth in headcount since 2013. It now has offices in London, Sydney and Chicago with a Japanese location planned.

Apttus’s cloud software has re-defined the Quote-to-Cash process and the flow of money, said Farouq Bastaki, Executive Director of Alternative Investments at KIA. “We believe they have developed the future of how organizations manage their entire revenue operation with a modern front office, in the cloud,” said Bastaki.

banks, Financial Services, News & Analysis, Salesforce, Simon Mulcahy, Skyhigh Networks, Software as a service

Salesforce doubles down on financial services

Salesforce is doubling down on financial services firms

Salesforce is doubling down on financial services firms

Salesforce is previewing a cloud platform tailored specifically to the needs of financial services professionals. The move comes the same week research reveals the average financial services firm uses over 1,000 cloud-based applications.

The cloud platform adapts Salesforce’s popular CRM platform to the financial services sector, and includes tools that enable financial services advisors to collaborate and communicate directly with their colleagues and clients.

Salesforce also said the platform, which was designed with the help of AIG Advisor Group, Northern Trust and United Capital, will integrate with tools created by other ISVs including companies that cater to financial services specifically (Advisor Software, Informatica and Yodlee for instance).

“Today’s investors want a much different relationship with their advisors than their parents had,” said Simon Mulcahy, senior vice president and general manager of financial services, Salesforce. “They want someone who understands them and engages them on their terms. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud sets advisors free from administrative tasks and gives them the modern tools they need to supercharge their relationships.”

The platform is in preview currently, with an initial release scheduled for February 2016.

The move comes the same week research from Skyhigh Networks shows cloud services uptake in financial services firms is at an all-time high.

According to the firm, which aggregated data of 3.7m employees at banks, insurance companies, credit card companies and investment funds worldwide, the average financial services firm uses 1,004 cloud services, with cloud-based collaboration platforms looking to be the most popular type of app deployed; the average financial services employees uses 31 distinct cloud applications.

News & Analysis, Salesforce, Software as a service, Tod Nielsen, Toopher, Verizon

Salesforce bakes security, compliance into native apps with Shield

Salesforce has launched Shield in a bid to improve confidence among highly regulated cloud adopters

Salesforce has launched Shield in a bid to improve confidence among highly regulated cloud adopters

Salesforce this week announced Salesforce Shield, a portfolio of “drag and drop” security and compliance assurance services that developers can bake into native Salesforce apps.

The Shield services include field audit trail and data integrity tracking, data encryption, archiving and event monitoring.

Salesforce said the services are already in use by some of the company’s clients in the financial services and healthcare services sectors.

“While many companies are leveraging the cloud to build apps at the speed of business, those in regulated industries have struggled to take full advantage of the cloud due to regulatory and compliance constraints,” said Tod Nielsen, executive vice president of Salesforce1 Platform, Salesforce.

“With Salesforce Shield, we are liberating these IT leaders and developers, and empowering them to quickly build the cloud apps their businesses need, with the trust Salesforce is known for.”

Salesforce said the move will help provide assurances to more heavily regulated sectors including developing applications with the Salesforce platform, particularly those that are learning more heavily on mobile platforms.

That said, mobile security has been a big focus for the firm in recent months. In April the company acquired Toopher, a Texas-based mobile authentication startup, and towards the end of last year the company joined Verizon’s dark fibre cloud interconnection service to give its customers more secure options for linking to its cloud platform.

Financial Results, Larry Ellison, News & Analysis, Oracle, Quarterlies, quarterly results, Safra Catz, Salesforce

Oracle Q4 cloud revenues grow 29%, down 5% overall

Larry Ellison said the company's cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce's revenue this year

Larry Ellison said the company’s cloud revenue will eclipse Salesforce’s revenue this year

Oracle Corporation has announced its 2015 fiscal Q4 quarterly earnings, unveiling impressive growth for its PaaS and SaaS business, which is up 29% on last year. The company posted overall revenue of $10.7 billion however, down 5% year on year.

After a bullish announcement of its Q3 results in March, where Oracle boss Larry Ellison publicly called out rival Salesforce, the software giant posted Software and Cloud business revenues at $8.4bn, down 6% year on year, while its SaaS and PaaS revenues came in at $416m.

Announcing the decline in revenues, Oracle was hasty to point the finger at the fluctuating strength of the US dollar against international exchange rates; it claimed total revenues would have been up 3%, software and cloud revenues up 2% and SaaS and PaaS growth 35% instead of 29% year on year, blaming the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz is expecting the growth of its SaaS and PaaS revenues to kick up a notch in fiscal year 2016.

“We sold an astonishing $426 million of new SaaS and PaaS annually recurring cloud subscription revenue in Q4,” he said. “We expect our rapidly increasing cloud sales to quickly translate into significantly more revenue and profits for Oracle Corporation.” For example, SaaS and PaaS revenues grew at a 34% constant currency rate in our just completed Q4, but we expect that revenue growth rate to jump to around 60% in constant currency this new fiscal year.”

In highlighting his firm’s ambition for the coming fiscal year, Ellison again took the chance to name-check one of Oracle’s main competitors.

“We expect to book between $1.5 and $2.0 billion of new SaaS and PaaS business this fiscal year,” he said. “That means Oracle would sell more new SaaS and PaaS business than salesforce.com plans to sell in their current fiscal year – the only remaining question is how much more. Oracle’s planned SaaS and PaaS revenue growth is around 60% in constant currency; salesforce.com has a planned growth rate of around 20%. When you contrast those growth rates it becomes clear that Oracle is on its way to becoming the world’s largest enterprise cloud company.”