Salesforce

The technological problem with the Internet of Things (IoT) is that various connected devices, household appliances and vehicles all have different operating systems with different communication or data collection methods. This means they can’t talk to each other because they don’t speak the same language. “Information isn’t valuable without an infrastructure to make it actionable […]

Kahuna, a mobile marketing automation startup going against Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com, revealed Wednesday it had raised $45 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Tenaya Capital, Sequoia and SoftTech, will be used for product development and to expand Kahuna’s team of 80. Kahuna’s clients like Dollar Shave Club, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel […]

For Hootsuite, it used to be all about text links on Twitter. Not so, anymore. The early Twitter client on Tuesday revealed native support for Instagram. So now, users can promote content on Instagram as well as across previously supported platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google pages. It also introduced recently link-to-buy functionality within […]

LiveFyre revealed Thursday it had raised $32 million in strategic investments from Salesforce Ventures and Adobe as part of a Series D round, in addition to $15 million in C2 financing in 2014. LiveFyre, which started out as a commenting platform, now markets itself as a hub of user-generated content for brands and publishers. The […]

Forrester Research crowned Adobe Marketing Cloud in its first-ever ranking of enterprise marketing software suites – informally called “marketing clouds.” The report, compiled by analysts Cory Munchbach and Rusty Warner and released Tuesday, encompassed eight vendors (Adobe, Salesforce.com, SAS, Teradata, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Marketo). Munchbach and Warner interviewed three clients from each vendor and tallied […]

Memo to marketing industry observers waiting for ad tech to merge with marketing tech: It’s probably safe to go make popcorn, as this could take a while. It’s been a year since Salesforce.com acquired ExactTarget. On Thursday, the company hosted a press event in San Francisco to commemorate the deal’s anniversary, using the occasion to […]

A recent article by New York Times media columnist David Carr revealed a radical publishing technology catching on in news media companies everywhere: email newsletters. Carr wrote that email is a marketing tool many people tend to forget about. But, he argued, email is the most consistent and useful medium for advertising. Email and search drive […]

When ad tech company IgnitionOne acquired data-management platform (DMP) Knotice, did it become a marketing cloud? CEO Will Margiloff would say the company was one even before. In the most literal sense, he’s right: “We decided back in 2011, well before anyone talked about marketing clouds, that you need to integrate the disparate pieces of […]

Oracle hosted a “launch event” Wednesday to introduce its Marketing Cloud, though the fact that Oracle has a suite is about as newsworthy as the world’s roundness. The enterprise software giant has been using that particular nomenclature since it acquired marketing automation solution Eloqua in December 2012. Oracle’s Marketing Cloud has several components. In addition to Eloqua, there’s social […]

Salesforce.com reported 37% revenue growth in Q4, to $1.15 billion, driven in part by the $2.5 billion July 2013 acquisition of ExactTarget. Its full year revenue was $4.07 billion, up 33% year-over-year. ExactTarget is the lynchpin of ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, which competes with analogous stacks fielded by Adobe and Oracle. Specifically, ExactTarget contributed $96 million in […]