Although nearly every research study and industry survey suggests the Internet of Things (IoT) market is growing rapidly, plenty of companies are holding back from pursuing IoT opportunities, for a variety of reasons.

Underlying all of the concerns and challenges regarding IoT is uncertainty about the immediate economic return on today’s IoT investments. Ironically, the possibility of a long-overdue financial downturn in the next few years could force executives to put aside their apprehensions and finally launch new IoT initiatives.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ analysis in E-Commerce Times about how a variety of new technologies and delivery models were born during the recessions of the past 50 years and what it means for the IoT marketplace.

As the tug of war between humans and machines escalates, we’ve become witnesses on nearly a daily basis to events that suggest there won’t be an ultimate winner or loser in this existential battle for survival and supremacy.

Two little human mistakes at the Academy Awards ceremony and within Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently received worldwide attention because of the power of today’s technology to magnify their impacts on a global scale. These events added more fuel to the argument that automation is a good thing that can eliminate human error and make our daily lives better and less susceptible to costly mistakes. However, there have been a series of snafus involving artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automated system deployment that are calling into question whether the accelerated innovations in these areas are going to outpace the usefulness of mere mortals.

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Businesses of every size are facing unprecedented challenges keeping pace with escalating customer expectations and competitive pressures.

These challenges have become especially daunting for large-scale enterprises that must contend with even greater complexities as they attempt to maximize their revenue opportunities while utilizing a highly dispersed sales team across multinational markets.

The revenue management challenge is determining and implementing the optimal mix of prices and customer/partner incentives (rebates) to impact revenue and profit margins.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives on Model N’s blog regarding how organizations can overcome these challenges by adopting an end-to-end revenue management platform.

Even as Salesforce.com aggressively seeks to consolidate its position as the leader of cloud-based front-office applications via a series of acquisitions, it is possible that 2017 could be the year the company uses some of the same purchases to make a strategic move. Salesforce soon may become a major player in the back-office financial management and enterprise resource planning market as well.

Speculation that Salesforce might expand its offerings to address the back-office needs of its corporate customers has been plentiful for a long time. Salesforce’s success in reinventing the nature of front-office applications via the cloud has convinced CFOs that the time has come to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to solve their back-office requirements.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in E-Commerce Times regarding how some of the recent Salesforce acquisitions include functional capabilities that cross over into the realm of back-office … Read More »

THINKstrategies announced today Rootstock Software has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Rootstock Software is a provider of Cloud-based manufacturing, distribution and supply chain solutions built and deployed on the Salesforce.com Platform. The Rootstock Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications provide the control and visibility required to elevate the total performance of manufacturing, distribution and supply chain operations.

Rootstock provided the following examples of customers that have gained measurable business benefits from its SaaS solutions:

Direct Energy Solar was able to reduce its monthly inventory adjustments from upwards … Read More »

As Salesforce continues to expand beyond its sales and marketing roots, there are ample questions about how it will move into the next era and beyond its initial CRM beginnings. After a spate of Salesforce acquisitions over the past year, the company has extended well beyond CRM into e-commerce and customer experience, artificial intelligence and new collaboration tools.

The question going forward is how effectively the company will integrate its billion-dollar acquisitions into the Customer Success Platform and whether its efforts will make Salesforce wide-ranging enough to truly extend beyond sales and marketing into the more wide-ranging domain of customer experience.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding how Salesforce intends to overcome these challenges and capitalize on the growing demand for Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in SearchSalesforce.com.

While the general public’s fascination with technology largely has been focused on the latest connected products unveiled at the recent CES conference in Las Vegas, many companies are trying to figure out where the real business opportunities lie in the long-awaited rise of the Internet of Things. One of the early proponents of IoT’s unprecedented potential was Salesforce.com, which promoted its own view of the concept in the form of the “Internet of the Customer,” or IoC.

Over the past three years, Salesforce has argued that creating connected products and services also can improve the customer experience, tighten the level of customer engagement, and create new business opportunities for the company. Since launching its IoC campaign and creating its IoT Cloud, Salesforce has been searching for the right formula to specifically meet the needs of its customers.

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As increasing digitization overtakes commerce (and virtually all industries), companies need to adjust with new technologies and new approaches.

Customers want to be able to research and make purchases on various devices and platforms (from online to in store). Companies are enlisting mobile devices, social platforms, live chat capabilities, communities, location-based technologies and e-commerce applications to create new capabilities in this digital commerce era. Creating an anytime, anywhere, omnichannel strategy has become critical for the e-commerce market.

Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) and the e-commerce market have been converging for some time. Although Amazon hasn’t explicitly stated that it intends to use its new Amazon Go retail service as the vehicle to offer its own CRM solution, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision the company finally entering the market.

Click here to read why THINKstrategies believes Amazon may be getting ready to move into … Read More »

Anyone who attended the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference — or watched many sessions online, as I did — probably is still trying to absorb the full implications of all of the company’s initiatives unveiled at the event. Although AWS already has redefined the computing and software development industries fundamentally, with its groundbreaking Infrastructure as a Service offerings, it isn’t resting on its laurels.

In fact, AWS’s parent company appears to have in mind far broader ambitions to significantly reshape the competitive landscape in more than just the IT industry in the coming years. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times about how Amazon is positioning itself to disrupt more industries in the coming year and beyond.

As the Cloud continues to gather steam as the go-to model for many companies, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are also gaining credence.

PaaS allows companies greater flexibility once they are in the cloud. PaaS enables customers to develop new applications and services on their existing portfolios of technology to enable new capabilities. With PaaS, companies can develop new mobile applications quickly, automate processes or streamline operations.

For software companies like SAP, PaaS can also unlock new doorways of modernization as well. At the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona, the company repositioned some core products to reflect its PaaS-oriented strategy. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives about SAP’s latest PaaS offerings and strategies in SearchCRM.