Demandbase officially announced ABM Analytics during its annual ABM Innovation Summit. The new tech, part of the company's account-based marketing platform, leverages its account identification technology to help marketers analyze performance from advertising to pipeline and revenue figures. "AI gives B2B marketers a clear view into the behavior of their target accounts," said CMO Peter Isaacson.

A number of trends have taken hold in the CRM space, according toHubSpot Sales Exec Brian Signorelli. "One of the first things that stands out to me is that, ironically, despite all the money that is spent on CRM overall, sales reps aren't spending that much time there," he said. "Instead, reps are using all these tools that are connected in some way to CRM, like email or sales acceleration."

Adobe this week introduced three features to its Target application in an effort to improve customer experiences through increased personalization: new Personalization Insights reports; Propensity score model comparisons; and Real-time customization models. These new features give users enhanced transparency and customization of Adobe Sensei-powered AI for personalization in Target.

Sales people and their managers should be celebrating the economic gains of the last few years but for many of them the gains may be illusory. Sixty-three percent of sales reps made quota in 2012, but five years later -- despite an improving economy -- that number dropped to 53 percent, according to CSO Insights' continuing research, which stretches over more than two decades.

Anyone who has attempted to adopt Salesforce cloud solutions in an enterprise environment knows that it may not be as easy as expected because of the additional effort typically required to integrate data sources. This is a common problem that has plagued the enterprise application industry since its inception. In fact, it spawned an entire subsegment of integration vendors and service providers.

Accent Technologies has announced the release of its new CRM Supercharger application, which guides selling and sales performance by applying intelligent data analytics to sales and buyer engagement data. Like all of Accent's products, the Supercharger application is based on the Software as a Service model. It targets mid-sized to large business-to-business companies.

Markets and companies change as industries grow and as a disruptive innovation commoditizes. Generally, prices come down because the innovation becomes commonplace and competitors fight for every scrap causing margin erosion. Eventually markets equilibrate, and a monopoly or small oligopoly sets in. We can see this playing out right now -- mature industries like databases have an oligopoly set up.

Salesforce has launched Salesforce Essentials, a collection of intelligent apps targeting SMBs. Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials offers a consumer-like experience optimized for any device. Relevant information is displayed on one unified console, with drag-and-drop customization. "Essentials is easy to try, set up, use and maintain," said Salesforce SVP Marie Rosecrans.

"Blockchain" is on everyone's lips in the tech industry, with vendors pushing it for everything from banking and finance to retail and apparel. "We're going to continue to see tech vendors trying to push blockchain as the solution to problems that may exist," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research. However, it may not be "a privacy-effective or cost-effective solution."

Red Hat has announced the addition of high-density storage capabilities to its in-memory data management technology. The company has expanded an alliance with Azul Systems to build on their prior collaboration to provide entitlements for Azul Zing with JBoss Data Grid subscriptions. The arrangement will help customers meet speed and volume needs for their big data environments.

Suse recently entered an agreement to expand its relationship with AWS, allowing Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to be sold directly on the AWS Marketplace. AWS customers that are running SAP workloads on Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications -- a leading platform for SAP Hana and SAP S/4Hana -- will get integrated and streamlined support from AWS and Suse.

One of CRM's overlooked benefits, accrued over many years, is its influence on business processes. Twenty or so years ago, front-office business processes were simplistic, due in part to the lack of technology support. For example, business leaders might have wanted to peer into a sales process to better incentivize sales reps, but rarely did so because it required a lot of data.

Nimble has released Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, its contact and pipeline manager for mobile sales teams and professionals. Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 unifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into one comprehensive relationship manager that surfaces the histories of conversations and provides social context. It is available for iOS now. An Android version will be released this spring.

Oracle has demonstrated artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in the Oracle Cloud Platform at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. Autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled for availability in the first half of this year. Oracle announced a slew of new PaaS features and capabilities.

As Amazon sets consumer expectations for rapid delivery to the home, companies in nearly every industry have been recognizing that they must move to the cloud to keep pace. This means revamping their transportation and logistics systems to meet their customers' escalating delivery expectations. These rising demands have been fueling the growth of a new generation of cloud-based, SaaS solutions.

SAP has agreed to acquire Callidus Software for about $2.4 billion to improve back-office to front-office links. The transaction is expected to close in Q2 2018, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. SAP will get Callidus Software's CallidusCloud, which offers a full suite of sales performance management and configure-price-quote solutions.

Quest Software on Monday announced a series of updates to its Toad open source database software applications, including new versions of its Toad Edge, Toad Data Point and Toad Intelligence Central products. After launching the first version of Toad Edge last summer, the company began seeing an uptick in downloads of freeware that supported MySQL on its Toad World community site.

Online retail has been booming, with consumers flocking to the Internet to shop for almost anything. Online retail revenues in the U.S. would reach a projected $445 billion in 2017 and jump to $600 billion by 2020, according to FTI Consulting. The U.S. government has begun developing a program that would allow agencies to utilize e-commerce portals for purchases of COTS products.

Google on Wednesday released its Cloud AutoML Vision service in Alpha. It is the first in a planned series of Cloud AutoML services designed to help people with limited machine learning expertise build their own custom models using advanced techniques such as learning2learn and transfer learning. Learning2learn is a process for automating machine learning

IBM and Maersk have announced a joint venture to create a platform based on Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, with the goal of creating huge efficiencies in the global supply chain. The goal is to use blockchain tech provide a more efficient method of standardizing shipping logistics. The partnership "has the potential to remake the shipping sector landscape," said Brian Behlendorf of The Linux Foundation.

The new battleground in enterprise software is likely to be the software platform. This is not to say that analytics and security are not important, but they are being handled in different ways. Security is being handled in ways that address both hardware and software vulnerabilities, but these things aren't what customers or consumers spend their days thinking about.

There was a lot in customer relationship management to like in 2017. The industry racked up north of $35 billion and the cloud reigned supreme. However, future growth presents a challenge. We're going to need to look beyond selling generic seats to grow the CRM market from here. It's a whole new ball game now that Oracle has credible cloud CRM. Other vendors will need to bring their A-games.

Heap has introduced a new feature set for its autonomous customer insight platform. Non-destructive data modeling allows users to define and model new insights without touching the raw data structure, resulting in faster iteration and speeding up productivity. Virtual event definitions let users retroactively update metrics on the fly wherever they are used.

Nanopay has unveiled a new platform that will let companies process business-to-business payments between bank accounts across borders. The platform is currently in private beta. It will become generally available in February, initially enabling cross-border payments between Canada and the United States. Cross-border payments with India and China will be added in Q2.

CoreOS on Tuesday announced the release of Tectonic 1.8, a Kubernetes container management platform. Tectonic enables enterprises to deploy key automation infrastructure components that function like managed cloud services without cloud vendor lock-in. The CoreOS Open Cloud Services Catalog offers an alternative to cloud vendors' proprietary services and APIs.

Configure, Price, Quote systems have a name problem. When they debuted, their basic functions gave a name to the category that was self-explanatory, and it fit well. As with any good idea in technology, however, frequent use brought with it demand for more functionality that quickly outstripped the technology's charter -- a happy problem.

Four big tech players this week moved to improve their handling of open source software licensing violations. Red Hat, Google, Facebook and IBM said they would apply error standards in GNU GPLv3 to all of their open source licensing, even licenses granted under older GPL agreements. "This will make everything consistent with GPLv3," said IP attorney Lawrence Rosen.

Corporate executives know that if they don't transform their companies into digital enterprises they're going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage. Yet many corporate leaders have been unable to make significant progress transforming their organizations. Many executives have found that changing their corporate cultures is a lot harder than adopting cloud-based applications and services.

We often talk about hybrid cloud business models, but virtually always in the context of traditional processor-bound applications. What if deep learning developers and service operators could run their GPU-accelerated model training or inference delivery service anywhere they wanted? What if they could do so without having to worry about which Nvidia graphics processor unit they were using?

IBM has announced IBM Cloud Private, a software platform that allows enterprise customers to run applications and store critical data in an on-premises, private cloud environment. The new service employs a Kubernetes-based container architecture that supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. IBM also introduced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software.