Salesforce, the world’s fastest growing cloud services company, formally announced the opening of their new business footprint in Bellevue, WA. The San Francisco-based company officially cut the ribbon at their latest engineering and research hub on Wednesday. With this, Salesforce moves closer to the blooming innovation capital of the world, which hosts Amazon, Oracle, Google, and Microsoft.

Parker Harris, Co-Founder, Salesforce, said, “By tapping into the local talent pool in the Seattle area, we can expand our world-class engineering team, accelerating our ability to create innovative products that redefine the customer experience.”

Bellevue Engineering & Innovation Hub is an architectural masterpiece, inspiring creativity, and collaboration among researchers, engineers, leaders and customers. Inside the new innovation center, artificial intelligence is all set to take an accelerated path. In coming months, workforce from Quip, Krux, SalesforceIQ CRM, Commerce Cloud, Einstein, IoT Cloud, Lightning, and Salesforce1 will converge at Bellevue, WA.

Salesforce’s new Bellevue office is a sprawling 70,000 square-feet product development hub, occupying three floors in the 19-storey 929 Office Tower. The company is optimistic about doubling its present headcount, adding at least 250 fresh employees by next year. It also plans to open new offices and innovation hubs in other parts of the world, catering to more than 150,000 customers globally.

“This will be one of the company’s largest engineering and innovation hubs,” said Elizabeth Pinkham, EVP of Real Estate for Salesforce. “This is a big deal.”

“We’ve been bursting at the seams with our existing space because there is such great talent in the area,” said Jim Walsh, Senior VP of Infrastructure Engineering at Salesforce, who will also head the company’s Seattle-area leader. “We wanted to get all our employees working in one space, with some room to expand in the future.”

Seattle-area is a budding ground for cloud computing companies and could well become the epicenter of artificial innovation. Salesforce’s Bellevue Engineering & Innovation Hub will help accelerate the company’s ability to innovate cutting-edge technology, partnering with its existing research teams. The new hub is all set to become the research capital for Salesforce’s imminent acquisitions in 2017.

Fluent, a people-based marketing platform, announced the launch of an Acquisition Marketing application on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. The new application will enable marketers to tie up the loose ends between their marketing campaigns and customer acquisitions using Oracle Responsys. Oracle Responsys is offered as a part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Fluent is a Silver level member and Cloud Standard Partner of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

Fluent’s latest customer data acquisition solution is built to optimize analytics, delivering relevant customer acquisition metrics running on the Agile Audience Engine.  The Acquisition Marketing application is currently available to Oracle Marketing Cloud customers. Oracle customers can easily identify and target customers based on their self-declared preferences towards brands, services, promotions, and products.

Why rely on Acquisition Marketing application?

Acquisition marketing is a key aspect of audience engagement which allows companies to accurately measure relative value of campaign based on consumer LTV. Marketers can, then, focus on growing their engagement effectively with the customer based on acquisition metrics, satisfying and retaining more customers with powerful omnichannel ad campaigns.

Fluent’s Seamless Integration with Oracle Marketing Cloud

Backed by powerful ad targeting solution, Fluent’s Acquisition Marketing application leverages built-in surveying capabilities. The results enhance marketer’s vision in deploying opt-in data acquisition campaigns using Fluent’s PerformanceNow.

Marketers can also utilize additional audience acquisition applications from Fluent to refine and activate their campaigns, leveraging fresh customer data in real time mined from Oracle Marketing Cloud. It’s the seamless integration with Oracle Marketing Cloud that ensures seamless follow-up with new loyalty club members based on ad targeting and customer experience analytics.

Fluent’s Acquisition Marketing Package

Currently, Fluent offers following data acquisition solutions –

Connect

A cost-effective consumer data acquisition product for marketers, Connect is a campaign performance booster. Marketers can serve highly targeted ads to acquire precise opt-in email IDs, SMS permissions, and custom data fields.

EnhanceConnect

Marketers can filter the acquired consumer data using this real-time CRM data. It is a data enhancement solution that drives a marketing campaign using grass-root details.

ReConnect

Reconnect with your customers by offering them interactive, highly personalized opt-in ads. ReConnect can transmit opt-in data in real-time, thus reducing the turn-around time for marketers.

Marketers can also drive mobile-centric Audience Acquisition campaigns using MobileNow. It extracts relevant mobile web inventory with precision targeting solutions available in Enhance. Overall, Fluent offers a complete package of Acquisition Marketing solutions for the web and mobile inventory.

FinancialForce, an enterprise cloud-based resource planning company, named its new CEO after its Founder-CEO stepped down on Friday. In a surprise move, CEO Jeremy Roche will make way for enterprise cloud specialist Tod Nielsen, the former CEO of Heroku and COO of VMWare. This is a strategic move to acquire more scalability for FinancialForce, considering Nielsen’s reputation as a platform game maker.

Tod Nielsen’s arrival will boost growth for FinancialForce, which is expected to touch $100 million as annual revenue in coming quarters. Meanwhile, there has been no official comment on Jeremy Roche’s future at FinancialForce. He is expected to serve as a special board advisor.

Tod Nielsen’s appointment as the CEO of FinancialForce comes merely 18 months after the Cloud ERP solution provider raised $110 million in funding. It has acquired close to $200 million so far and is currently evaluated at $530 million. Nielsen’s experience with Salesforce cloud platform will prove to be a huge advantage for FinancialForce.

Previously, Nielsen was the EVP Platform (App Cloud) at Salesforce, partner of FinancialForce on its Cloud ERP. Interestingly, Nielsen was appointed CEO of Heroku after it was acquired by Salesforce, apart from piloting a project to integrate Force and Heroku operations.

According to a leading business source, FinancialForce management decided to shake up the top order as a strategic move to gain market mileage from the current enterprise Cloud ERP segment. While its relationship with Salesforce will remain “symbiotic”, the new CEO at the helm of things will power new innovations and customer-centric development in Cloud ERP models. Roche decided to step down proactively to open new doors for someone with extensive experience in raising cloud models from the scratch.

“I think the market opportunity is a great tail wind to help us." New CEO Tod Nielsen chats with @TechCrunch https://t.co/yrMKetTV3J

— Certinia (@CertiniaInc) January 6, 2017

In an interview with CNBC in October 2016, Jeremy Roche had expressed his desire to take FinancialForce to a new height. He wanted to build a “new Oracle or SAP”. Instead of relying on Salesforce’s AppExchange platform, which is a fee-based app installation marketplace, FinancialForce could be developing and supplying its own Cloud ERP suite independently.

Tod Nielsen at FinancialForce could lead to a clear disruption in the rather “calm” legacy enterprise ecosystem. From a partner to a competitor, FinancialForce’s long-term ambition is to grow beyond Salesforce and shed its start-up image in coming months.

TimesSquare Capital Management LLC, a leading research-oriented investment management company, has acquired fresh shares of Salesforce.com Inc. It was revealed from its latest filing of Form 13F with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the third quarter of 2016. According to the filing, TimesSquare has acquired 50,740 Salesforce shares stock with an estimated evaluation of US $3.6 million.

On the opening day of 2017, Salesforce shares traded at $68.46, 1 per cent down from its last recorded standing. Salesforce’s stock portfolio has 4,523,271 shares with market cap of $47.70 billion. It enjoys a price-to-earnings ratio of 232.07 with 1.46 beta.

Other significant investors and hedge funds with stakes in Salesforce.com have also made changes to their portfolio. Vanguard Group Inc., for instance, increased its Salesforce shares by 3.1%, acquiring 1, 1,181,756 shares during the fourth quarter. It now has 39,426,135 shares of Salesforce with total evaluation of $3,130,829,000.

New York-based Jennison Associates LLC also moved its share ownership at Salesforce.com by 3.2% in the third quarter. With 20,758,784 shares, Jennison Associates LLC owns stocks worth worth $1,480,724,000. BlackRock Institutional Trust Company N.A. reinforced its position too. It gained 585,931 shares during the last quarter taking its total number of shares to 16,980,055 worth $1,211,187,000. One of the bigger moves came from Ameriprise Financial Inc. It increased its position in Salesforce by 5.1%, taking its tally to 8,648,009 shares valued at $616,865,000.

UK-based independent investment fund manager, Baillie Gifford & Co also increased its share in Salesforce.com. It might look like a negligible raise, but with 0.7% rise in number of shares, it took its tally to 6,981,936 shares, evaluated at $554,435,000.

Approximately 85% stocks of Salesforce.com are owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

TimesGroup acquiring new stake in Salesforce.com reveals the business value of the CRM solutions provider.

Surprisingly, Marc Benioff, the CEO-Chairman of Salesforce.com brought down his share in the company’s stock on 30 December. He sold 12,500 shares at a cumulative transactional value of $857,750. Director Susan Wojcicki had acquired 1300 shares in the company’s stock in November 2016. Currently, company insiders still hold 6.70% of Salesforce.com’s stocks.

Meanwhile, TimesGroup Capital Management LLC seems to be on New Year buying spree. Apart from acquiring Salesforce.com stocks, the investment adviser also raised its stake in Intuit Inc., the leading enterprise software company in US. According to the SEC filing, TimesGroup bought 10,730 shares during the third quarter to take its portfolio in Intuit to 69,995, valued at over $7,700,000.

For the year 2016, Salesforce.com registered revenue of $6.667 billion with total equity of $5 billion. Currently, it has three subsidiaries – Quip, Demandware and Heroku.