David Needle

Sales professionals, particularly Millennials, are increasingly using social media to find prospects, make a pitch and even close deals, according to a LinkedIn-sponsored survey. The survey of more than 1,000 sales professionals across the United States covering a cross-section of industries and company sizes, found that 90 percent of the top salespeople surveyed said they […]

SAN JOSE—Virtual stores, virtual worlds, immersive environments, 360-degree cameras, developer tools and more were on display here at one of the biggest events focused on virtual reality. With almost 150 exhibitors, the third annual Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference and expo, running April 27-29 has come a long way since 2014. “We had 34 exhibitors […]

Salesforce.com is wasting no time updating the SteelBrick CPQ (Configure Price Quote) software it acquired three months ago. That’s a pretty quick turnaround to integrate the company and its key product into the Salesforce platform, not to mention adding new features. The company credits the fact that SteelBrick was built using Saleforce’s own Lightning developer […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel gathered enterprise developers, customers and media here for a Cloud Day event that featured new products and some impressive customer examples of private and hybrid cloud systems they have implemented. Intel declared the trend toward cloud computing is at least as important as the chip architectures the company developed to power the PC […]

Salesforce.com has been pushing to make analytics more accessible to users of its CRM platform and now it’s aiming to do the same for those customers’ business partners, such as resellers and manufacturers. In February, Salesforce announced that data and insights from its Sales Wave data analytics application would be available from directly within the […]

Salesforce.com continues to expand the capabilities and reach of its cloud applications with the March 15 announcement of a new offering for Service Cloud customers. The CRM giant says Field Service Lightning is designed to bring repair personnel, service representatives and other field workers into the mobile era by giving them real-time access to the […]

Salesforce.com has bolstered Salesforce Shield, its network activity monitoring system, with a new Transaction Security feature that keeps track of who is authorized to access sensitive data and flags attempts to access protected files by unauthorized users. Salesforce Shield, originally released in July 2015, enabled IT administrators and security specialists to see user activity at […]

As its name implies, Salesforce.com has traditionally targeted sales and marketing departments with its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform, but Salesforce.org, the philanthropic arm of the cloud computing giant, has a different mission. On March 1, Salesforce.org announced the release of a Higher Education Data Architecture (HEDA), open source code and a set of […]

Salesforce.com announced its Salesforce Health Cloud last September, giving potential customers a chance to kick the tires while the company made some final tweaks before its full official release Feb. 29 at the HIMMS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Las Vegas. Salesforce also shared more Health Cloud details and partnership news. Salesforce […]

Twitter may be best known as a consumer social network, but it can be a useful tool to business as well. In fact the San Francisco-based social media firm has been developing new services for businesses including Customer Feedback and Direct Message that Salesforce.com says it’s eager to integrate with its Customer Relationship Management platform. […]

Search engines, online maps and consumer review sites like Yelp make it easy to locate a restaurant or other retailer you may want to visit, along with their hours of operations and content like dinner menus. But easy doesn’t always mean accurate. Retailers change locations, store hours and prices, and that information isn’t immediately updated […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—A panel of industry experts here debated the merits and impact of big data following a preview of an hourlong documentary on the topic that will premiere nationally on PBS channels Feb. 24. The documentary, The Human Face of Big Data, is based in part on the coffee table book of the same […]