Tag: salesforce

Digital skills crisis hits post-pandemic UK

Posted on July 8, 2021 by - News

While the English football team might be winning, it is not a sign that all is well in Blighty, according to a new report out by IDC and Salesforce.

The report shows the scale of the UK’s growing digital skills crisis and calls on government and businesses to prioritise reskilling to boost post-pandemic recovery.

As the UK economy looks to post-pandemic recovery in a new, digital-first world, the changing nature of jobs poses challenges for workers in every industry.

According to IDC, one in six UK workers have low or no digital skills. By 2030, nine out of 10 workers will need to learn new skills to do their jobs, at the cost of £1.3 billion a year.

Salesforce’s buyout shows market for collaboration tools growing

Posted on December 2, 2020 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce’s decision to buy Slack for $27.7 billion is proof that the collaboration tools space is becoming vital to the market, according to one of its rivals.

Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, another secure collaboration platform said: “Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack is an interesting move for the company and validates the continued demand for collaboration tools in the market.”

He said that the move fuels the rivalry between Microsoft and Slack, which escalated recently when Slack filed an antitrust complaint against the former for unfairly using Office to promote Microsoft Teams. If Slack are to successfully compete, they need to join an open ecosystem for collaboration.

Enterprises spend more on clouds

Posted on November 3, 2020 by - News

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of this year increased by 33 percent to $33 billion

Figures from Synergy Research Group showed that the year-on-year growth rate for Q3 was higher than the 32 per cent growth seen in the previous quarter. T

Amazon and Microsoft accounted for over half of the global market, with Amazon’s market share staying at around 33 percent, while Microsoft’s share was over 18 percent.

Google, Alibaba and Tencent were growing quicker than the overall market and are increasing market share . Together they account for 17 percent of the market.

The other cloud providers in the top ten rankings include IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT and SAP. 

Microsoft, c3.ai and Adobe take on Salesforce

Posted on November 2, 2020 by - News

Microsoft campusMicrosoft and Adobe are launching a new platform to take on the market dominance of Salesforce.

C3 AI CRM is powered by the core functionality of Dynamics 365 and is combined with Adobe’s real-time customer profiles and journey management, as well as c3.ai’s industry-specific AI capabilities.

The AI-driven CRM platform is, it’s claimed, purpose-built for specific industries and uses data from any source to produce meaningful business insights. The collective claims that conventional CRM is not sufficient for the modern age, given that AI can’t be used to analyse much of the data because they weren’t built with the appropriate architectures.

Salesforce punishes staff after record breaking quarter

Posted on August 29, 2020 by - News

Salesforce logoA day after CEO Marc Benioff praised the company’s 54,000 staff for delivering a record-breaking quarter he was busy sending out P45s and pink slips to 1,000 staff that made its success.

Those affected by the cuts have 60 days to find a new role in the company, with those who don’t find a job within the organisation being offered a redundancy package.

Those most likely to be affected are reportedly those who joined the organisation through acquisitions such as Tableau and MuleSoft.

Five cloud services providers took more than a third of the market

Posted on August 21, 2020 by - News

Beancounters at IDC claimed that the global public cloud services market totalled $233.4 billion (£176 billion) in 2019, representing a 26 percent increase year on year.

The report claims that the top five public cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com – accounted for more than a third of the worldwide total, growing a combined 35 percent year over year.

Software as a service (SaaS) remained the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019, an increase of 20 percent year-over-year. IDC expects SaaS growth to continue as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as businesses shift to subscription-based models and look to software collaboration tools to facilitate remote working.

IDC’s Rick Villars said that the cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored search and underpinned digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic.

Wipro buys Salesforce partner 4C

Posted on July 24, 2020 by - News

Wipro has signed a definitive agreement to buy 4C, one of the largest Salesforce partners in UK, Europe and the Middle East.

Established in 1997 with its headquarters in Mechelen, Belgium, 4C is an independent Salesforce Platinum Partner.

It claims deep capabilities across multiple Salesforce clouds including Sales, Marketing, Field Services and specialises in transforming Quote-to-Cash processes with Salesforce’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) and Billing solutions. 

Salesforce wants to help firms reopen

Posted on May 5, 2020 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce  has announced its Work.com site which it says will provide new technology solutions and resources to help business and community leaders around the world reopen safely, re-skill employees and respond efficiently on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Work.com includes new solutions to accelerate private and public sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including employee wellness assessment; shift management; contact tracing; emergency response management; and grants and volunteer management. The Work.com Command Center brings all data streams together so that businesses and communities can make more informed decisions.

Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia steps down from Salesforce

Posted on March 20, 2020 by - News

Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia has stepped down from her role as Salesforce’s UK Chief Executive after six months

Gadhia apparently wants to spend more time with her price comparison startup Snoop, which recently won financial backing from Salesforce’s venture investing division. She will remain as an adviser to Salesforce.

Paul Smith, executive vice president and general manager for Salesforce UK and Ireland, will now take on the business responsibilities in the region, the company confirmed.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO. “We look forward to continuing to work with Jayne-Anne in her role as a strategic advisor to Salesforce and wish Snoop enormous success.”

Salesforce’s Vlocity acquisition improves its CRM abilities

Posted on February 27, 2020 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce has spruced up its CRM abilities by writing a $1.33 billion cheque for Vlocity in an all-cash deal.

According to GlobalData the move will mean that Vlocity’s capabilities can he used to further strengthen its platform offerings and enhance its presence across key industry verticals, where Vlocity has its customer base.

Sunil Kumar Verma, Lead ICT Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company said Vlocity has a strong presence across several verticals, which include energy, health, insurance, utility, government organisations, communications, media and entertainment. The acquisition means that Salesforce will  gain access to key customers of Vlocity, which include Deutsche Telekom, ENGIE and British Gas.

AWS deepens Salesforce partnership

Posted on November 20, 2019 by - News

AWS has announced Salesforce will be offering AWS telephony and call transcription services with Amazon Connect as part of its Service Cloud call centre solution.

Patrick Beyries, VP of product management for Service Cloud said: “We have a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will allow customers to purchase Amazon Connect from us, and then it will be pre-integrated and out of the box to provide a full transcription of the call, and of course that’s alongside an actual call recording of the call.”

Ciauri exits Salesforce to revamp Google Cloud sales

Posted on September 3, 2019 by - Moving People

Chris Ciauri will leave Salesforce Ciauri to spearhead Google Cloud’s sales face-lift

Ciauri has been named at Google’s EMEA cloud president, with a focus on expanding the firm’s commercial potency and reaching more customers.

He was an executive vice president EMEA at Salesforce after ten years at the company. Ciaurihas held sales roles at several tech companies, including Adobe Systems and Peoplesoft. He will lead Google Cloud’s push to improve the way it serves its existing customers.

His predecessor in the role, Sebastien Marotte, is taking on the part of vice president for the channel in EMEA.

Google shook up its remuneration structure in July by reducing the base salary for salespeople and increasing quarterly bonuses for hitting sales targets.

Salesforce provides partners with three new tools

Posted on July 22, 2019 by - News

Salesforce has enhanced its Sales Cloud Partner Relationship Management (PRM) service with three new tools.

The first new tool, called Einstein Analytics, helps businesses identify and prioritise leads using AI-driven insights. Through its powerful data mining capabilities, the software uses past lead and opportunity performance to provide predictive recommendations for the future.

Salesforce said Einstein Discovery could analyse recent opportunities and find that trade show attendance strongly impacts winning deals, which would enable firms to allocate budget for shows and extend invites to prospective customers.

Salesforce starts UK expansion

Posted on June 14, 2018 by - News

Salesforce logoSalesforce will invest $2 billion in the UK over the next five years.

The cunning plan is to bolster its UK business – with the vendor’s second UK datacentre set to open next year.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said: “The UK is Salesforce’s largest market in Europe and our commitment to driving growth, innovation and customer success in the region has never been stronger.

“With this significant investment, we are well positioned to pursue the incredible opportunity for Salesforce, our customers and partners in the British market.”

Current Prime Minister Theresa May  said the investment cements the UK’s status as a country at the forefront of innovation.

“Salesforce offers a wonderful example of the benefits a successful technology company can bring to the UK economy, and I welcome their continued investment which will create interesting and high-skilled jobs for our workforce”, she said.

“The UK is already home to some of the world’s most innovative technology companies, and we will continue to drive investment in the sector through our modern industrial strategy.”

The vendor claims that, along with its partners, it will generate $65 billion of net new business in the UK by 2022.

Salesforce also expects to create more than 329,000 “direct and indirect” jobs over the same period.