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Adobe Recreates Beethoven’s Magic with Adobe Experience Cloud

Pipeline & Analytics

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March 21, 2017

Adobe Experience Cloud– The “First, Ubiquitous Cross-Channel” Cloud suite in the industry announced at Adobe Summit, Las Vegas

In less than 48 hours, we have Adobe Experience Cloud climbing to the top of marketing technology stack! Adobe chose the perfect stage to unveil one of its finest Cloud products till date- the Adobe Experience Cloud. The new Experience Cloud for marketing and analytics that integrates with Creative Cloud was introduced during the ongoing Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.

At the same event, the marketing cloud and technology innovation firm also released the Adobe Advertising Cloud, branding it as industry’s first end-to-end platform for managing advertising across traditional TV and digital formats. The cloud for cross-channel advertising is the result arising from Adobe’s acquisition of Tube Mogul in December 2016.

Like Beethoven, Adobe is aiming at bringing the joy of pure marketing with a creative touch, putting various elements of Clouds like Creative, Document, Marketing Analytics and Advertising into a single enterprise suite.

What is Adobe Experience Cloud?

Adobe Experience Cloud is a comprehensive set of cloud services, designed ingeniously to provide B2B enterprises everything they need to deliver extraordinary customer experiences. The new cloud solution comprises of Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics Cloud. Built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, Experience Cloud leverages Adobe Sensei’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Adobe Sensei was itself announced in the last Adobe Summit in March 2016.

Enlightening the industry on how Adobe intends to leverage customer intelligence and cloud integration for better experiences, Brad Rencher, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Marketing, Adobe says –

“At Adobe, we believe experience is the great differentiator, the make-or-break attribute to ignite life-long customer advocacy and growth. Leveraging deep customer intelligence, Adobe Experience Cloud gives businesses everything they need to deliver a well-designed, personal and consistent experience that delights customers at every touchpoint.”

Adobe Experience Cloud Marks the Maturity of Marketing Clouds

Adobe Experience Cloud combines best-in-business solutions, bringing a complete, extensible platform, comprehensive data and content systems, offered through a robust partner ecosystem for an unparalleled experience delivery expertise.

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Brand Differentiation for Proactive Engagement

Marketers can craft experiences that differentiate their brands, connect with customers and proactively engage them using Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social and Adobe Primetime within Experience Cloud suite.

Brands can manage, personalize, optimize and orchestrate campaigns and customer journeys at scale.

Adobe Advertising Cloud

Embrace Programmatic for Cross-Channel Advertising

Integrating with Adobe Experience Cloud, the latest advertising solution aims to solve problems arising from increasingly complex and fragmented landscape, with legacy silos for media planning and buying across TV and digital.

Now available globally, Adobe Advertising Cloud includes –

AMO Search: the leading search management platform
AMO Demand Side Platform (DSP): automates display, social, video and programmatic TV buying
AMO Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): dynamic creative optimization tied into Creative Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud will deliver sweet amalgamation of all marketing efforts through centralized advertising planning and buying platform, bringing full transparency into exactly where ads appear and how effective they are at driving business results.

Adobe Analytics Cloud

Turn Insights into Actions, Real-time

Adobe Analytics Cloud, powered by new enhancements in Adobe I/O, is the customer intelligence engine. It powers businesses by enabling them to move from insights to action in real-time by uniquely integrating audience data across all Adobe clouds.

Adobe Analytics Cloud combines Adobe Audience Manager, the leading data and audience management platform, and Adobe Analytics, the industry leading solution for applying real-time analytics and detailed audience segmentation across all marketing channels. Built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, which provides open APIs, a standard data model, and Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s unified AI and machine learning framework.

New I/O Events and Creative Cloud APIs offer developers access to Creative Cloud assets and events. For example, a developer can build a custom application that responds when a creative file is changed, or a new Creative Cloud asset is uploaded, and programmatically move that content into marketing execution.

Adobe Analytics Cloud enables brands to better capture, aggregate, rationalize and understand vast amounts of their own disparate data and then translate that data into singular profiles of their customers.

Exchange Partner Integrations

Several partners, including Acxiom, AppDynamics, Clicktale, Decibel Insight, Dun & Bradstreet, Mastercard, Ooyala, SapientRazorfish and others announced new integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud.

Marketers can plan and activate more effective programs by combining Adobe Analytics data using Adobe Audience Manager.

Adobe also deepened its partnership with Microsoft and unveiled the first set of joint solutions that integrate Adobe Experience Cloud with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft PowerBI.

Adobe Sensei for Enterprises

Adobe also released several new Sensei capabilities for the enterprise including Fluid Experiences to enable brands to deliver the experience consumers expect across any connected screen, including social, VR, IoT devices and physical screens. In addition, Auto-Target eliminates the complexity associated with manual testing and deterministic or rule-based content personalization. The company also released Enhanced Anomaly Detection and Contribution Analysis to help brands identify statistically significant events, pinpoint sources and take action to optimize the user experience.

Adobe Sensei, as the intelligence layer in the Adobe Cloud Platform, provides customers with a unified AI and machine learning framework as well as intelligent services to help them work smarter and faster. In Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Sensei already powers over 100 intelligent capabilities including Intelligent Alerts, Automated Advertising Insights, Anomaly Detection and Lookalike Modeling.

Apart from the launch of Adobe Experience Cloud and vital additions to other cloud stacks, the company also announced integration between Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager Forms. This will help marketers optimize complex, form-based work processes and deliver engaging, mobile-friendly digital experiences across the customer journey.

Will Adobe Experience Cloud become the “First, Ubiquitous Cross-Channel” Cloud suite in the industry?

We will have more insights on this development very shortly.

Interview with Sean Burke, CEO, KiteDesk

STS Staff Writer

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March 16, 2017

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[mnky_team name=”Sean Burke” position=”CEO, KiteDesk”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/seanburkeh” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanhburke/”]

[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Technology today is being built for marketing OR sales, and the way we see it in future, is that it is going to be built for marketing AND sales.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a martech company)

I joined KiteDesk in 2013. At that time, the co-founders Jack Kennedy and Jared Rodriguez, whom I met through an investor group, had just started writing the code for a Sales Engagement Platform that connected cloud applications together. After seeing the shell of what they created, I saw a lot of potential in where the product could eventually go. More importantly than the technology, there was alignment between Jack, Jared, and myself, from a core values perspective. I am in my ninth early stage venture, and one thing that I have learned is that core values are non-negotiable.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?

Your question is timely because we are in the middle of a strategy session at KiteDesk right now. Our entire management team is thinking through the future requirements of sales and marketing teams. In addition, I’ve been doing interviews with CMOs to understand where they see marketing technology evolving. Luckily, so far, our views are the same.

Almost across the board, we are hearing that it all starts with Accounts. CMO’s are recognizing that marketing and sales need to align at the account level to make sure they are executing consistently with branding and messaging.

Sales-Marketing alignment is the real problem here and it’s massive. IDC’s research on this topic estimates that there is a drain of around 10% of revenues each year from companies where sales and marketing are not aligned. If you take that number and apply to the total number of B2B companies, the lost revenue numbers add up quickly.

We need to be able to see what happening throughout the lifecycle of the interests of clients and right now…Technology is being built for marketing OR sales, vs. being built for marketing AND sales.

Buyers want specifically thought out conversations with people who can help make their business better. That wedge between marketing and sales is going to get bigger and bigger without an account level approach.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Since it’s March 8th, 2017, the Salesforce and IBM announcement related to their massive
partnership in AI is pretty tough to ignore. With the Einstein’s vision for AI in marketing, Salesforce is now going to be able to do things like visual search, brand detection, and product identification in any application. So, I think most people are standing up and taking a long look at the problems IBM and Salesforce will be solving.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?

You can call it unification, simplification or parsing down, but that’s what I am hearing from Marketing Leaders. Some of the CMOs I have spoken to are giving me a list of their MarTech stack and they stopped counting at 20 technologies!

CMOs are going through the process of deciding if all of these technologies are being used and if they are driving results. Those technologies that aren’t generating an actual ROI are getting cut out of the budget.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

We use Terminus for ABM, so I follow them. I am interested in seeing how they increase their ability to report on Account interest.
I’m also watching Gong.io. While they may not be considered martech, they are measuring conversational intelligence. Understanding what makes a conversation valuable from a buyer’s perspective is a big deal, so I want to see what insights they are able to glean from their tool. And the third one, just from the perspective of building an interesting new database of private companies, is Owler. I can’t wait to see how far Owler goes in the type of data it creates.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

We use Pardot, Salesforce for CRM, KiteDesk for all of our account targeting, engagement and analytics. Additionally, we use tools like SproutSocial and Buffer for our social media work; the entire Google suite for analytics, Adwords, etc; Terminus for ABM and then Adroll for retargeting.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)

This campaign in was early days of KiteDesk when we were operating in a guerrilla marketing mode. As a small company, based Tampa Florida, no one really knew us. During this stage of our product evolution, we were giving people an idea of how well they were connected to each other. So you could upload a bunch of contacts in KiteDesk and it would tell you the strength of the relationship on how well two people are connected by analyzing emails, calendar events, relationships you had in common, etc.

We decided to create a list of the top 100 social marketers and social sellers. We enlisted a third party agency to help us build the list. They looked at the breadth of each person’s network and how active they were on social networks. These two factors were used in order to understand the entire reach of each person. It was a very formal process.
When we shared that list via Forbes, it was the number 1 article for an entire week, and that was at the same time as the Malaysian aircraft crash!

Our website traffic just took off. What we learned from this campaign, is that it’s the network effect is powerful. Because we recognized people that had huge social graphs, they tapped into their network to spread the word about the list. And even the people who didn’t make it to the list were asking why they were not on it! That was probably the best executed digital campaign we have done.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?

We are looking at where to add AI to our product. For example, instead of having people manually enter in all of the contacts they should be working in an account – that is something that can be automated.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Chunks. Each chunk is focused on 1-thing that requires my attention and once it is done, I move on to the next.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

The honest truth is there’s no app I can’t live without, but I spend most of my time on Gmail, Salesforce, Pardot and LinkedIn.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Delegation (a lot of people forget that but it’s important)

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I’m currently reading a book Peter Cohan called Great Demo! He is an expert on giving a great demos of your software product.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Marry your best friend. Luckily I did.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

The secrets to my success are perseverance and curiosity. What am I better at than everyone else? Giving my daughter material to make fun of me with…she is 15 and is really skilled at making fun of her Dad.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

CMO of Microsoft, Chris Caposella. I am really curious to hear what his thoughts are since the acquisition of LinkedIn. I think that’s a tremendous opportunity of data source and network power. They now have a tremendous data source in their product portfolio, I’m curious to see how they utilize it.

MTS: Thank you Sean! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

About Sean
About KiteDesk

About Sean

Sean’s focus at KiteDesk is leading the effort to deliver a sales platform that is not only irresistible but also one that delivers results. He balances his time between providing product leadership and feedback, working closely with the sales and marketing teams on delivering value, learning and listening to clients, working with the investor community and writing thought leadership pieces for the KiteDesk blog.

Sean is a serial entrepreneur and has acted as a founding or as a core leadership team member in nine early stage companies. These companies cover a wide spectrum of industries including technology, financial services and consulting. Combined the companies that Sean has been involved with have appeared on the Inc 500/5000 a remarkable 13 times.

Sean earned a Masters of Business Administration in Marketing from DePaul University and a Bachelor’s of Science in Management from Purdue University. He’s acted as an adjunct professor in marketing and finance and actively serves on local boards related to growing technology and entrepreneurship in the Tampa Bay Area.

About KiteDesk

KiteDesk helps B2B sales teams grow faster, smarter. We’re dedicated to making tough jobs easier. We’ve designed the easiest ways to consistently find and follow-up with accounts across multiple channels. The results we offer are predictable pipeline. Our customers set more appointments and book more revenue. KiteDesk changes your sales flow for the better, every day.

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Informatica Partners With Google Cloud to Bring Quick-Scale Marketing Analytics

Pipeline & Analytics

STS Staff Writer

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March 14, 2017

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Informatica Cloud extends partnership with Google Cloud. It will offer data integration solution for Google BigQuery. The company also announced world’s first Cloud Lake Data Management solution to support existing SQL Data Warehouse platforms.

Informatica^®, the leading data integration and Cloud management company, announced about extending its partnership with Google Cloud at the recently concluded Google Cloud NEXT’17. The extended partnership with Google Cloud will enable Informatica in providing best-in-class services in areas of cloud integration, marketing analytics, and data warehouse modernization.

By partnering with Google Cloud, Informatica aims to transform the way businesses mine, use and scale data adding more power to their existing platforms with more accurate and faster insights, agility and lower costs of operation. The expanded collaboration between Informatica and Google offers unified customers easy, frictionless data migration to Google Cloud. The unified data management and cloud integration platform help in scaling up marketing efforts via “one-stop-shop” for the complete and accurate view of marketing data in Google BigQuery.

In addition to the latest partnership, Informatica also announced world’s first Cloud Lake Data Management Solution. Built on the Informatica Intelligent Data Lake^®, the new cloud data lake management solution offers authoritative data from across the entire organization in their hands for more informed decision making. Informatica Cloud Data Lake Management supports Amazon Web Services Redshift, Amazon Aurora, Microsoft Azure SQL Database and Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse.

Informatica’s Mission: Provide Quick-scale Enterprise Cloud Data Capabilities at Lowest Cost

“One of the great challenges for marketers today is that they are awash in data about their customers,” said Sally Jenkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Informatica.

“A decade ago marketing was a discipline driven by preference, experience and gut-feeling. Today, marketers are one of the most data-driven function in organizations. With Informatica, customers can pull data from the critical marketing systems, such as Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce, into Google BigQuery. By combining Google Cloud Platform, an extremely powerful, scalable and cost-effective big data analytics platform, with Informatica Cloud® which offers connectivity and data management, customers can expect powerful insights, recommendations and offers, which is what everyone is looking for.”

How will CMOs benefit from this martech partnership between Google Cloud and Informatica?

Marketing analytics is the ubiquitous requirement of every CMO, and hence investments are achieving hyper-growth attention from martech companies that focus on bringing an unadulterated real-time data. Informatica working with Google Cloud intends to help marketing professionals experience the ease of using data-driven market engine within their organizations, at the lowest cost of deployment and operation.

As Ajay Gandhi, VP Informatica Cloud Marketing puts it –

“Increasingly, CEOs and CFOs are asking CMOs for the spend accountability and show ROI on marketing spend. The simple marketing mantra is: do NOT spend money if you cannot measure it. Gone are the days of spending millions of dollars on marketing initiatives that aren’t targeted and relying on a “spray and pray” approach.”

Accelerating Marketing Analytics with Automatic Centralizing of Data

B2B marketers can put marketing data in a supercharged mode using Google Cloud, which announced the introduction of BigQuery Data Service. This will automatically centralize data from AdWords, YouTube, DoubleClick and Google Analytics 360, offering marketers a single, unhindered ‘source of truth’. Informatica Cloud will provide exclusive Google Cloud Platform Connectors to kick off BigQuery projects seamlessly.

Pointing at the expected outcomes from the collaboration, Gandhi adds, “The result enables CMOs and their team to address many of the biggest data and operational challenges in moving to a high performing data-driven marketing organization.”

Quick Seamless Integration for B2B Customers

Informatica’s data management offerings are well aligned and are expanding their support for the Google Cloud Platform, providing integration with Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

Google BigQuery

Informatica Cloud for cloud integration scales from proof-of-concept to petabyte-scale production systems. With the Informatica Cloud connector for Google BigQuery, Google Cloud customers can use Informatica Cloud’s native, high volume connectors to transform and load data into and out of BigQuery from cloud applications, social IoT and on-premise sources.

Google Cloud Storage

With the Informatica Cloud connector for Google Cloud Storage, Informatica Cloud can move and synchronize data of all types and volumes into and out of Google Cloud Storage for big data analytics.

Cloud SQL

Informatica Cloud support for Cloud SQL will simplify the migration of data from on-premise databases into Cloud SQL, Google’s fully managed, transactional database service.

Informatica further enhances the value for marketing organizations by combining, enriching and augmenting existing Google Marketing data with data from social, CRM and marketing automation sources.

Informatica’s out-of-the-box connectivity to sources such as Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics quickly transforms and loads the desired data into Google BigQuery for a holistic view of the entire marketing landscape. These powerful insights allow organizations to provide next great offers to their customers based on past purchases, preferences, and behaviors on the web.

Additionally, Informatica will also support all new Google Cloud Platform products with planned availability of connectivity to Google Spanner.

As execution becomes the core ‘point of action’ in digital marketing initiatives for CMOs, Informatica’s readily applicable cloud data management and marketing data analytics platform helps businesses save time, effort and revenue with buffer for adjustments and fine tuning.

CMOs can now execute and experiment competitively with their data, unperturbed by the fear of failing.

Enterprises Spending More on Collaboration and ERP Services in SaaS Market Than Cloud

Pipeline & Analytics

STS Staff Writer

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March 12, 2017

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It’s official. Enterprises across the US are investing more on ERP and collaboration than ever before. According to the latest report from Synergy Research Group, enterprise SaaS market grew 32% YoY, touching $13 billion in quarterly revenues in Q4 2016. The SaaS market is now more matured and more dominating than public cloud computing services. The report mentions Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe, ADP, and IBM, reflecting how big names have performed in 2016. Surprisingly, Synergy Research Group identifies Google and Oracle as the top SaaS vendors that registered highest growth rates.

According to John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group – “There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come.”

“Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base of on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship. Meanwhile, the relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”

Synergy Research Group further added that SaaS market will grow at 2X in size and revenue by 2020, registering growth across all product segments and geographical areas. This particular report substantiates IDC’s projections made in its Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. It states that enterprises spending on public cloud infrastructure and services will reach $122.5 billion in 2017, registering 24.4% growth over 2016. Between 2015-2020, cloud spending will grow 21.5% CAGR.

via KPMG Technology Innovation Survey 2015

In another interesting report, 2015 Global Technology Innovation Survey picked Public cloud computing, mobile platforms and apps, IoT, machine-to-machine and data and analytics as the most disruptive technologies till 2020.

StatX Raises $2.5 Million from 3 Investors; Launches Universal B2B Notification App for Mobile

STS Staff Writer

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March 10, 2017

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StatX, the leading provider of business intelligence and collaborations solutions, announced that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from three investors, led by Signia Venture Partners. The analytics technology firm confirmed via press release that they have also unveiled a universal mobile notification app for B2B collaboration. The Santa Clara, California-based company plans to allocate rest of the seed fund for product development and commercial distribution.

Prasad Raje, CEO, and co-founder of StatX says, “StatX helps businesses answer the question – what just changed in my business? By monitoring, understanding and being aware of change, businesses everywhere are more informed… And when you are more informed you can take action that drives your business forward.”

Prasad Raje via LinkedIn — *Prasad Raje, CEO StatX, via LinkedIn*

The latest StatX app ensures that you do not miss critical business info by instantly delivering business updates to a single app on mobile from virtually any information system, which may otherwise be lost while communicating through legacy methods of email, chat, and dashboards.

On what led to a realization of this innovation, Pablo Bellver, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of StatX, enlightens us by recounting his past experiences at work. He says, “When I was at Google, a few co-workers and I created Google Now to provide consumers relevant information at the right time. At StatX, we believe that business updates should find you instead of the other way around.”

With StatX, you can link to data coming in from QuickBooks (number 1 rated small businesses accounting software) and receive push notifications on the go in a custom fashion. You can choose to receive notices on daily financial metrics, like cash or accounts receivable, or get the results of a marketing campaign shared by your marketing person via MailChimp. You can also receive notifications from Google Tasks when an assistant completes tasks. StatX can be integrated with Zapier, Github, Google Task, Google Sheets, QuickBooks accounting, Xero Accounting, Tesla, MailChimp, WordPress, Toggl, and REST API.

B2B marketers who have used StatX app admit that automated updates and instant notifications on mobile help collaborate better anytime, anyplace. This automatically translates into higher customer success with clients.

The StatX app brings the superlative visual element into collaboration tools, clearing the frustration team members to face collaborating virtually. Each user can easily consume the information he or she needs at one glance. The “stat” visually represents metrics that matter to a user. Whenever there’s a change, the user is notified via push notifications like news. The stat can be created and updated interactively on mobile or linked to data in most software systems.

Zaw Thet, tech investor and partner at Signia Venture Partners sounded upbeat about the funding that enabled StatX to launch its latest app. Thet says, “StatX is blazing a trail in the market as the first mobile-only enterprise SaaS app. Any SaaS system can now add a native mobile experience with StatX and enhance the ability to respond instantly to any change.”

“Business data is in so many systems; StatX bridges the gap between any data and the executive who needs to see it,” said Kanwal Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus, which is also an investor in StatX. He adds, “StatX lets you have one app for all your business systems.”

XSeedCapital is the third investor in StatX. As per the latest update from StatX, Kanwal Rekhi and Zaw Thet have joined the StatX Board.

Google Turns Hangouts Into Slack Competitor

Mobile & Field Sales Enablement

STS Staff Writer

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March 10, 2017

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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 Unveils World’s First Communications Cloud; Also Acquires Cross-Chatting Platform LeChat

Mobile & Field Sales Enablement

STS Staff Writer

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March 10, 2017

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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 Cloud^TM, 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 Cloud^TM 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!

More power in Clouds!

D&B Hoovers Unveiled to Bring Enhanced Personalization and Account-Based Success into Sales Cycles

STS Staff Writer

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March 9, 2017

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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

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 Announces Sales Operations Veteran Anthony Reynolds as New CEO

Mobile & Field Sales Enablement

STS Staff Writer

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March 9, 2017

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Altify Announces Sales Operations Veteran Anthony Reynolds as New CEO

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 Acquires SmarterMe to Improve Sales Productivity Using Personal Mobile Assistants

STS Staff Writer

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March 8, 2017

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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.”

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.

Adobe Experience Cloud– The “First, Ubiquitous Cross-Channel” Cloud suite in the industry announced at Adobe Summit, Las Vegas

What is Adobe Experience Cloud?

Adobe Experience Cloud Marks the Maturity of Marketing Clouds

Adobe Marketing Cloud

Brand Differentiation for Proactive Engagement

Adobe Advertising Cloud

Embrace Programmatic for Cross-Channel Advertising

Adobe Analytics Cloud

Turn Insights into Actions, Real-time

Exchange Partner Integrations

Adobe Sensei for Enterprises

Informatica’s Mission: Provide Quick-scale Enterprise Cloud Data Capabilities at Lowest Cost

How will CMOs benefit from this martech partnership between Google Cloud and Informatica?

Accelerating Marketing Analytics with Automatic Centralizing of Data

Quick Seamless Integration for B2B Customers

Google BigQuery

Google Cloud Storage

Cloud SQL

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.

Various components of D&B Hoovers

SmartLists

CRM QuickView and Automation Integrations

Lead Builder: Targeted Lists

Hoover’s Solution Advantage

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