Revamped Hangout apps will be part of Google’s big push into business technology; Set to take on competitors in business chat and video conferencing.
Google has launched what looks like its own Slack “killer” – an all new Hangouts Chat app as part of its G-Suite enterprise workplace tools. Google has split the Hangouts app into two parts — Hangouts Meet for video conferencing, and Hangouts Chat. Like Microsoft, which is ready to launch its own Slack competitor “Teams” on March 14th, Google is hoping that integration with the rest of their business apps products will make it more attractive to enterprises than Slack or other business communication tools.
After multiple failed attempts to make Hangouts a success, Google may have finally hit upon the right positioning for Hangouts – as a business tool that evokes instant comparisons with Slack. Focusing on business chat looks like a better play given the success of Slack, and because Hangouts is now a firmly part of Google big push into business technology, they can focus solely on corporate users.
Based on the demo shared by Google at its Cloud Next event, the new apps are slick looking, with a rich set of messaging and collaboration features. G Suite customers can access Hangouts Meet right now while Hangouts Chat is in trial mode and will be available to the general public at an undisclosed date.
Like Slack, you get team chat rooms with threaded conversations, in-built document sharing (integrated via G-Suite) and search functionality. The new Hangouts Chat platform also supports bots and third-party apps, including @meet, a bot which uses natural language processing and machine learning to automate scheduling of meetings in Google Calendar.
Hangouts Meet is Google’s attempt to disrupt business video conferencing by simplifying. Google claims to have streamlined the interface to make it lighter, faster and smoother and say that Meet can have over 30 people join a meeting by simply clicking a shared link or dialing in or using the mobile app can. Meet also supports full-screen presentations and integration with Google Suite, allowing enterprise users to easily pull up files for presenting in Meet.
8×8 Inc. has unveiled world’s first Communications Cloud that unifies enterprise communications, team collaboration, contact centers and real-time analytics in a single platform on March 8. Subsequently, the company also announced that it has acquired LeChat, Inc., the maker of Sameroom™, an interoperability app platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration in the enterprise. The product launch and acquisition augurs well for the enterprise communications technology firm, intending to provide a centralized collaboration platform for sales, marketing, customer service and technology teams.
By launching 8×8 Communications CloudTM, the company intends to enable companies to select collaboration services that best meet their teams’ needs without having to worry about interoperability between various platforms. Currently, LeChat’s Sameroom integrates with over two dozen different messaging and team collaboration apps, including Slack, Skype, HipChat and more. Thus, the two developments, though exclusive in their occurrence, are connected by virtue of their delivery model.
Sameroom brings to 8×8 a depth of experience in building and launching high-scale, commercial group-messaging solutions, as well as extensive knowledge of the industry’s leading team collaboration apps, making it possible to establish reliable, bidirectional collaborative environments involving unrelated organizational units using different chat platforms.
Andrei Soroker, co-founder of Sameroom, says, “Team collaboration has long been the internal approach of choice for technical teams. But as these tools started to spread across the enterprise, the lack of cross-team and cross-platform interoperability resulted in two fundamental problems – noncompliance and fragmentation.”
“8×8 understands that true unified communications and collaboration requires a new and open approach to team collaboration, which is why Sameroom was acquired. With this move, Sameroom will now be able to help more companies enable team collaboration as the technology becomes core to the 8×8 Communications Cloud.”
CEO of 8×8 Inc., Vik Verma, adds, “With Sameroom, our customers will enable their internal teams and external partners to collaborate across different team messaging apps of their choice, creating an open, more seamless communications and collaboration environment that is fully compliant with corporate policy. This new technology is the key to delivering messaging capabilities to all of 8×8’s services. We’re ushering in the era of the first true and open communications cloud, complete with cross-cloud integration, interoperability and real-time analytics.”
Commenting on the other important milestone 8X8 achieved with introduction of world’s first communications cloud, Verma said, “The 8×8 Communications Cloud marks the beginning of a new era for our industry where all communications, team collaboration, contact center and analytics are unified in a single, open platform that integrates across all clouds and applications used by lines of business. This convergence of two healthy and thriving markets- communications and collaboration- is going to change the way employees, customers and partners use and consume communications intelligence, making them better informed, more productive and more effective than ever before. The days of a fragmented communications landscape are numbered.”
The release of 8×8 Communications CloudTM comes within a month of partnership with CarrierSales, which is a leading cloud deployment enabler for enterprises. By teaming up with CarrierSales, 8X8 brings enterprise-grade, cloud contact center and unified communication solutions to businesses of all sizes, selling its proprietary Visual Contact Center and Virtual Office Solutions via Cloud.
8×8’s strategic product innovation received a major push when it announced the appointment of tech industry veteran Dejan Deklich as Senior Vice President of Global Research & Development. He is piloting the team that is responsible for developing product vision and roadmap for next-generation enterprise cloud architecture. Competition is getting sleek and heavy in enterprise collaboration sector, even as Google just announced a Slack-like addition in Hangouts!
Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., the New Jersey-based B2B data provisioning company, announced the launch of a new sales acceleration solution —D&B Hoovers. The new sales tech solution will combine Dun & Bradstreet’s commercial database and prospect intelligence.
D&B Hoovers is branded as an intelligent, intuitive and integrated sales acceleration platform that enables salespersons to target leads more strategically and enhance sales productivity in shorter sales cycles. D&B Hoovers draws intelligence from d&b’s core information assets, helping users to align for account-based success and grow revenues.
“Businesses of all sizes have the opportunity to grow by better leveraging today’s enhanced software and technology to more quickly drive pipeline and garner marketing ROI,” said Rishi Dave, chief marketing officer at Dun & Bradstreet, in a statement.
“D&B Hoovers is the best solution for enabling sales and marketing teams to align around the same connected, dynamic data and analytics to make their efforts more impactful, and help them go to market and close deals at a faster rate.”
D&B Hoovers is the result of the unification of insights-rich d&b data and robust Avention OneSource platform. The new sales acceleration platform provides deep account insights to support creation of account-specific messaging and content, delivered through salestech ecosystem connectors like CRM, MAP, web personalization and advertising campaigns.
Various components of D&B Hoovers
via D&B
SmartLists
A dynamic feature that updates sales teams on top opportunities and provides Business Intelligence, analytics, and account-based scoring. It has 175+ search filters for precise targeting based on NLP and conceptual search.
CRM QuickView and Automation Integrations
A quick integration that uses D&B Direct API to channel real-time intelligence into sales and marketing applications. It provides seamless access to account intelligence over an intuitive dashboard with automated workflow. Top features include – triggers, alerts, IdealProfiles and Conceptual Search, as well as mobile-ready sales acceleration solutions.
Lead Builder: Targeted Lists
Lead Builder is the foundation of D&B Hoovers for an effective marketing and sales, helping users hit the “sweet spot” of the market with enhanced engagement. It helps in building customized marketing lists for Direct Mail Campaigns, Telemarketing, Email, and Messaging.
Hoover’s Solution Advantage
This is an all-inclusive unified feature for sales, marketing, business development and other verticals, making it easy for users.
Back in January when D&B acquired Avention, President and COO Josh Peirez mentioned how the company saw a natural fit between the two companies and committed to offering best-in-class technology for B2B marketers and sales pros. D&B-Avention formulations won’t stop at D&B Hoovers. In coming months, the integration will add more teeth Dun & Bradstreet’s Sales Acceleration product portfolio. The current portfolio includes Hoover’s, Avention, NetProspex, and Strategic Alliance. In totality, the combined package of these products has generated more than $200 million in 2016. For 2017, D&B Hoovers is a welcome addition.
n coming months, the integration will add more teeth Dun & Bradstreet’s Sales Acceleration product portfolio. The current portfolio includes Hoover’s, Avention, NetProspex, and Strategic Alliance. In totality, the combined package of these products has generated more than $200 million in 2016. For 2017, D&B Hoovers is a welcome addition.
Altify, the leading provider of sales engagement and sales performance solutions, has appointed B2B software veteran Anthony Reynolds as their new CEO. Reynolds is stepping to take place of previous leader, Donal Daly, who shifts to take the position of Executive Chairman. In his new role, Reynolds will pilot Altify’s unified efforts to expand into the competitive sales transformation industry.
Excited about his new role as the CEO of Alitfy, Anthony Reynolds says, “Altify began with a vision to completely transform how sales organizations improve performance by using data and methodology to help sales teams nurture the accounts that matter most.”
Previous to his new role as the CEO of Altify, Reynolds has served as the Executive VP of Anaplan. At Anaplan, Anthony Reynolds helped the company its employee strength by 240% within 22 months. He was chiefly responsible for company’s sales operations, enablement and customer success. Reynolds brings to Altify superlative track record in Sales Transformation technology industry, owing to his stint at SAP, where he was the Executive VP and COO, Technology Solutions and Mobile Sales.
Thanking his predecessor Donal, Reynolds added, “It has consistently outpaced competitors in delivering value to its customers. Donal has built a great company that truly cares about its customers, has the best products in the sales enablement space and a wonderful team. I’m incredibly excited to begin as CEO as we become the de-facto standard for sales professionals, through growth, innovation and customer success.”
Daly will remain engaged in the business, spending more time with customers, working hand-in-hand with the sales team on key relationships, and investing deeply in long-term strategy.
“We have been extremely fortunate on our journey so far,” said Donal Daly, executive chairman of Altify.
Donal added, “We have great customers and an amazing team. Now we have an opportunity to build on that momentum. I looked long and hard for an executive with the right cultural fit and values, proven track record and experience to lead the charge for the next phase of growth — and could not be more pleased to announce the appointment of Anthony as our new chief executive.”
Last year, Altify added Artificial Intelligence capabilities into its sales enablement stack. Branded as Altify Max, the AI-driven sales engagement platform brings real-time insights, coaching, and notifications to bring dramatic transformation in sales methodologies and results.
Altify recently released a report, titled Business Performance Benchmark Study 2017, which finds 70% of enterprise salespeople believing Digital Transformation as the biggest disruptor of current business practices.
e-Zest, the leading provider of digital transformation and engineering technology solutions, announced that it has acquired SmarterMe, an intelligent mobile command center for sales and marketing. The acquisition will enable e-Zest to build and provide enterprise software for mobile, targeting salespeople across diverse industries. At the time of publishing this news, the terms of the deal remained undisclosed.
SmarterMe, which is a comprehensive sales IQ and smart assistance provider, replicates the workflow of sales pros through personalized mobile apps. The apps provide timely collaboration between the team members, providing easy share and interactions about prospects and partners without stepping into each other’s shoes.
Devendra Deshmukh, CEO of e-Zest says, “SmarterMe is a strategic fit for e-Zest as it aligns perfectly with our mission 2020 of becoming premium digital transformation leader and substantiates our line of offerings to customers across the globe.”
He further adds, “With cloud delivery and machine learning platform of SmarterMe, built by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and enterprise software veterans from software and cloud computing leaders like SAP, Hewlett-Packard and Salesforce.com, we aim to impact sales productivity significantly for our customers globally.”
e-Zest is expected to bring significant customization and integration into its digital transformation solutions for enterprise and product development for ISVs. SmarterMe can be used as a tool integrated with CRM or as a standalone application. It currently integrates with Salesforce and soon its Dynamics 365 & Siebel connector will be available.
Ashish Srimal Founder & CEO at SmarterMe adds, “By applying intelligence and Mobile-First design to power the next generation enterprise software, we will continue to help users get their work done by bringing the right information, the right application just at the right time and in the flow of their work.”
“Together with e-Zest’s capability and its experience of working with Fortune 1000 companies we will be uniquely positioned to deliver personalized experiences.”
via SmarterMe
CTO at SmarterMe Nitin Gupta affirms the martech roadmap is heavily dependent on bots, virtual assistants, and mobile user experience. Users are increasingly looking for alternate experiences on smart devices, Internet TV and home assistants like Alexa and Google Home. By acquiring SmarterMe, e-Zest will leverage technology to bring the same user experience to B2B clients.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty via Salesforce
IBM has partnered marketing cloud specialist Salesforce to deliver a unified AI- powered solution, bringing together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. Both AI platforms will be deployed using a new integration practice formed by Bluewolf, an IBM company.
As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf’s new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly.
It’s been a few weeks since IBM CEO Ginni Rometty attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. From that same event, her clarion call to innovators about building technologies around cognitive learning and artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have made its first visible impact. Marc Benioff, obviously wanted to be the first thought leader in the martech industry and realize this unified vision.
The unprecedented unification of two AI technologies – IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. The partnership has been forged with an objective of leveraging human intelligence for critical missions and not for time-consuming siloes management. AI will, therefore, make smarter, faster and ROI –specific decisions, freeing humans for ground-breaking innovations.
Currently, IBM is a strategic investor in Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce, helping the #1 CRM develop a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities.
Customers of both companies will be able to access advanced insights from Watson directly with the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform. It will combine deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson’s structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.
IBM and Salesforce to Apply Cognitive Technologies for Every Business
Apart from IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein integration, the two technology giants also announced the release of IBM Application Integration Suite for Salesforce and addition of Bluewolf Dedicated Consulting Services and Expertise for Cognitive Solutions into Salesforce’s existing CRM platform.
IBM Watson + Salesforce Einstein
Ginni Rometty, chairman, President and CEO, IBM says, “Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business—will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,”
“This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people—through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with yesterday’s announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers.”
Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce says, “The combination of Einstein and Watson will make businesses smarter and our customers more successful,” said “I’m thrilled to form an alliance with IBM—no company’s core values are as close to Salesforce’s as IBM’s. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Mission Critical Objectives of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein Integration
Serve real-time predictive insights across organization
To bring predictive insights from unstructured data, inside or outside an enterprise, together with predictive insights from customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein to enable smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.
Combine customer data for campaign success
To combine customer behavior data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, helping retailers automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.
Enhance business reach of IBM Watson on Salesforce App Exchange
To extend the business reach of IBM Weather Insights for Salesforce. The Weather Company will power a new Lightning component on the Salesforce AppExchange to provide weather insights that inform customer interactions and business performance.
Unify Cloud and On-premise data
To bring together on-premise enterprise and cloud data with specialized integration products for Salesforce, surfacing that data directly within the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform.
Provide macroeconomic information for smarter decisions
To unify client data, such as individual investments and risk profiles, with financial trends and public macroeconomic information from IBM Application Integration Suite right within Salesforce to make smarter decisions for her customers.
The proliferation of AI into technologies for marketing, sales and customer service activities has been rapid. As Google CEO Sergey Brin puts it – “The revolution in deep nets has been very profound, it definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there. I feel like the Luddite in the room.”
By partnering with Salesforce, IBM intends to take away that “Luddite” feeling out of every CMOs mind.
Brainshark, Inc., delivering SaaS-based sales enablement and readiness solutions, today announced an enhanced integration with Salesforce, enabling salespeople to share content in Brainshark with Salesforce contacts from within Microsoft Outlook. Building upon Brainshark’s long-established training and coaching integration with Salesforce, the new capabilities enable salespeople to:
Find recommended content for the intended email recipient based on Salesforce record attributes, such as role and industry
Easily email relevant Brainshark sales content, such as case studies and product videos, to Salesforce contacts and opportunities in the context of the sales cycle
Track content engagement, including when and how long an asset was viewed, and sync those interactions with Salesforce records, enabling reps to take the next best action based on more complete and accurate information
“By connecting the content, data and technology across these systems, sales enablement leaders are not only making it much easier for their reps to sell but also gaining deeper insights into what content and training contribute to better sales performance,” said Rachel Goldberg, senior director of product marketing at Brainshark. “These enhancements exemplify Brainshark’s continued focus on helping organizations improve sales effectiveness from the CRM systems they use every day.”
Brainshark has also been certified by Salesforce as Lightning Ready. Lightning is the latest platform from Salesforce designed to provide a consistent, intuitive and flexible user experience on any device. Now companies can easily access Brainshark training, coaching and content resources from both Salesforce Classic and Lightning.
In addition, Brainshark now provides sales reps and managers with more flexible access to learning content in Salesforce Classic, Lightning and Salesforce1.
Meltwater, the leading B2B data analytics company, announced the launch of a bespoke business intelligence tool – Executive Alerts. Meltwater Executive Alerts tool, which is created specifically for senior-level executives, provides critical insights about their company, competitors, and industry, distributed and shared directly over smart devices. The latest addition to the media intelligence platform comes within a fortnight of Wrapidity’s acquisition, heralding the arrival of a new league of B2B collaboration and decision-making tools in the coming months.
Meltwater Executive Alerts delivers real-time insights, providing senior executives top 5-10 critical events in the company, market and in the competition on a daily basis. Executives can now understand the momentum and the story behind each alert, accessing them as they happen on the most preferred smart device.
Zubair Timol, Director of Strategy EMEA, Meltwater, says – “Senior executives across all functions and sectors need accurate, real-time data from outside of their company to make sound decisions, and Executive Alerts empowers them to do just that.”
Meltwater Executive Alerts also integrates with email, Slack, text and other enterprise collaboration tool, allowing executives to pull reports and documents with a single click.
As companies increasingly look to unify their marketing and sales processes by gaining real-time insights across the organization, the latest Meltwater Executive Alerts is a worthy addition to the growing stack of technologies. With businesses moving into hyper-connected ecosystems, tools like the one Meltwater just released offer infinite opportunities for teams to derive more value out of their B2B collaborations.
Though IoT and Cloud connectivity remain the first-generation technologies for most companies, introducing Meltwater Executive Alerts enable businesses to collaborate seamlessly not just with the employees but also the vendors and partners.
Marketing solutions company Equals 3 launched ‘Lucy’ in May of 2016. Billed as a cognitive companion for marketers, Lucy is a machine learning-based intelligent assistant that makes use of IBM’s Watson platform, and applies it to solve marketing problems. Lucy is seeing significant adoption, and was recently named a “Ad Tech/Marketing Tech/Financial Tech to Watch” finalist by Advertising Age. MarTech Series caught up with Equals 3 co-founder Scott Litman, to see Lucy in action, talk about their growth since launch, and the benefits of using the IBM Watson platform.
Lucy works by using the natural language processing and predictive analytics powers of IBM Watson, and integrating APIs from hundreds of disparate data sources, thus allowing marketers to quickly leverage first and third party data. Litman believes that because Lucy can accomplish in hours what would previously take days or weeks to do, this represents a huge leap for the way marketing teams operate. He said that Lucy integrates more APIs than any other Watson product, “sifting through massive amounts of data to provide the most relevant answer to a virtually limitless amount of questions.”
With Lucy, businesses can capitalize on this cognitive capacity to automate time-consuming tasks, boost productivity, allowing sales & marketing to focus on revenue generation. Activities that require a lot of man hours, such as pulling together customer profiles, researching potential markets, and building media plans, are completed much faster. Litman feels that Lucy is a unique solution in that there is no other AI based assistant which can integrate data from proprietary third party data licensed by their clients.
In the 9 months since launching Lucy, they have seen significant adoption from enterprise brands and global agencies. Six of the top global agencies are working with them, he said, naming WPP and Havas Media as two of the biggest clients. This success he thinks is because there is no other AI based solution with this level of “cognitive and emotional (more on that below) ability,” and because of Watson’s “fantastic ability to scale.”
Equal 3 currently offers three use cases for sales and marketing teams to use Lucy – research, segmentation, and media planning. Litman pointed out that Lucy is customized for each and every client, because depending on the data of the client, the AI needs to be trained to understand it. Understanding of language combined with the training of data from various structured, unstructured and licensed data sources of each client, is how Lucy can answer with precision exactly what the user is looking for.
Litman thinks Lucy is a great tool for actually putting to use all of the data that clients invest in, but don’t utilize. With the amount of data a Fortune 1000 enterprise can generate, it’s virtually an impossible task for human teams to glean insights at scale and speed. “The real value is that Lucy saves time in the minutiae of market research.”
He showed how it pulls together a report in minutes, by finding graphs, data, articles and media by searching thousands of documents across the client’s disparate data sources. However Lucy does not crawl public domain data, so only sources owned or licensed by the client can be tapped.
While demonstrating the segmentation ability of Lucy, Litman emphasized on how it allows marketers to build 1:1 personalization at scale. “Lucy creates unique audience segments which allows us to get to a level of emotional understanding of the customer.” This is done by using psychological models developed by Carl Jung, to segment customers based on their emotional profile.
So customers are segmented not just on the basic filters like geography and demographics, but Lucy also segments them into in-built emotional personas such as Magician, Sage, and Rebel etc. “These segments represent a much better way to create personal customer experiences at every step of the way. By looking at a customer on a 1:1 level and analyzing what they are talking about, marketers can run tighter, smarter journeys, and run personalized campaigns and social ads for target segments.”
How do they plan to compete with new AI technology from tech giants, and what does the future look like for Lucy? Equal 3 is positioning Lucy as a companion tool, says Litman, which can sit side-by-side with the largest systems used by enterprises, and removing the need for marketers to login into several interfaces. He added that they benefit from having great relationships with the third party data providers of all kinds, including business databases, web data, social data, news sources etc.
For now, he says, Equal 3 is focused on adding new features and expanding their growing client base.
Technology is the answer for everything humanely erratic. The biggest challenge marketing and sales teams face in their workflow are the lack of coordination and unified vision. As Scott Salkin, CEO of Allbound, mentioned in our interview series — “Companies are lacking that “single pane of glass” to let them see how their martech activities are performing across platforms and channels.” Eventually, the gaps in collaboration magnify in the form of poor customer success rate.
Providing quick-fix answers to every critical revenue stream in the business, Totango unveiled a collaborative chatbot named Zoe™. The chatbot, which has a natural language, conversational interface, gets everyone in the organization to participate and impact customer success. Totango’s Zoe™ provides every employee access to all aspects of customer data.
via Totango Zoe
“There’s nothing on the market that can unlock a company’s true potential to drive customer success the way Zoe™ can, ” asserted Totango Co-founder and CEO, Guy Nirpaz, while introducing the product at the fifth Annual Customer Success Summit in San Fransisco, C.A.
Clicktale, an enterprise-class experience management platform, was quick to adopt Zoe™. Confident on the value it brings to table, Shai Rybak, VP Customer Success, Clicktale, remarked, “Our entire team at Clicktale now has immediate access to customer data directly within Slack through Zoe™. Employees from all departments can make better decisions to impact our customers quickly and positively.”
Many customer success professionals at leading companies like Autodesk, Zoom and Taboola use Totango’s platform to actively monitor their customer health. engage well and connect the dots of customer data.
In the last year, more established enterprise companies are turning to customer success to support their digital businesses. The next step is for companies to enable customer success across all functions,” says Nirpaz.
Zoe™ was launched to meet growing potential of SaaS software subscription market expected to grow twice the size of the $60 billion growth in 2014, by 2019.
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