R. Danes
Latest from R. Danes
Can we get a handle on all these runaway work apps, please?
Has Slack killed email? Not quite. Rather, it seems the number of software applications people use at work just keeps snowballing, and the lot of them is getting unwieldy. Is there a blanket solution handy to collect them all in a single meeting place? Smartsheet Inc. wants to be the landing spot for all of ...
These AWS teammates punt and pass their way to data insights
Companies are amassing data — structured, semi-structured and unstructured — at a rapid pace. Vendors are hard pressed to keep up, as these vats of disparate data aren’t easy to make sense of. It takes a complementary set of intelligent tools to punt complex tasks back and forth to score the final, golden, insights, according ...
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The new promise of big data: Latest AI does it better
A few years back, the promise of big data was overblown by open-source zealots who thought value would magically spring from fathoms-deep data lakes. The reality that highly intelligent tools are necessary to fish out insights before the window to value closes has since sunk in. That is why artificial intelligence and machine learning have replaced ...
How companies are using automation today to get to industry 4.0
Trigger warning: Robots and automation may indeed do some jobs better than the human reading this. But, take heart, they tend to be the rote, repetitive tasks that no one wants to do anyway. It could spell job loss for workers but also open a new vista of productivity. Two consulting pros recently weighed in ...
SaaS mouth: How customers talk back to subscription software
If cost and convenience aren’t enough to lure companies away from capital expenditure and hardware toward operating expenditure and cloud-based software, here’s another reason. Subscription-based software makers pretty much have to take customer feedback seriously to stave off all-too-easy cancellations. The result is a product that slavishly caters to customer whims, according to Steve De ...
Shrinking down sales forecasting with a click in Conga Composer
Who doesn’t love spending half a day drafting a sales-account forecast? Getting all the data together and rendering it with visuals can require a lot of tedious work with a handful of tools. One company found an application in Salesforce.com Inc.’s AppExchange that drastically cut the time it takes with the click of a button. “I ...
Pivotal’s MPP platform giddy-ups analytics horsepower
The end game so many customers seek from the smorgasbord of technologies they’re buying lately is often big data analytics. Deriving intelligent insights from data requires a sometimes cumbersome amount of advanced infrastructure and software. A massively parallel processing (or MPP) data platform can provide some of the needed horsepower. “Users are looking for an ...
Plain-language translator makes peace between business and data science
Business people might logically incline that decisions should be based on data — but do they feel and act like they they should be based on data? The shroud around complex data science keeps line-of-business people and managers a step shy of total trust in data insights. Tools that explain in plain terms what data is ...
Smart contracts: AI could help negotiators close better deals
What’s so great about contract life cycle management? Isn’t it basically just a digitized cardboard box filled with old contracts, kept merely for compliance purposes? Not with new machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies baked in, it’s not. We’ve entered the third phase of CLM, according to Bob DeSantis (pictured, left), chief operating officer of AppExtremes ...
Conga e-document suite is customer-satisfaction king at Salesforce
Salesforce.com Inc.’s ecosystem is a bustling group of consulting partners, independent software vendors, and others bringing the future of work to enterprises. As these relationships evolve and scale over time, some companies take on new roles within the ecosytem. AppExtremes LLC (doing business as Conga) even has Salesforce reselling its electronic-document software to customers. Simplus is ...