Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau is no big surprise. Despite the massive price tag, it fits perfectly with the SaaS giant’s ambition to be come an insights-rich platform for all things customer.

Salesforce and Amazon are both planning on entirely eliminating Oracle software from crucial business systems and replacing it "with open-source database software alternatives," reports The Information. Oracle Founder and CTO Larry Ellison's colorful remarks about the companies in the past is said to have impacted the move. 
Amazon already transitioned two internal databases that take care of its e-commerce operation to open-source NoSQL, reports Bloomberg. Salesforce is developing an internal database — code-named "Sayonara" — for its customer management and marketing automation software. Salesforce plans to end its reliance on Oracle by 2023. 
Oracle's database is currently considered the top in the world, according to The Information, but its reputation is overshadowed by price. There are now cheaper alternatives for customers. 

Salesforce.com, a leading CRM software provider, has experienced outstanding growth in recent years.

Over the next four years, the company plans to double its current revenue to $20 billion to $22 billion annually.

Based on my valuation models, the company's shares likely offer an investment opportunity with an above market rate of return.

Companies that are managing these large partner networks already rely upon Salesforce to power partner sales and create self-service communities. Now, with Distributed Marketing from Salesforce, corporate marketers can pre-build personalized customer journeys with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and deploy them to their partner networks. From there, partners using Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Community Cloud can easily manage and personalize these consumer journeys--such as on-boarding new clients, holiday promotions and renewals.

On Monday, Salesforce and Google announced they are pooling data and cloud resources together, letting marketers view stats from both platforms within Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics dashboards.

According to Google, this is the first time Analytics have been deeply integrated into a CRM solution and a deal between the two companies. One strong component hints at Saleforce’s move into advertising: Customers will be able to purchase Google ads based on how consumers respond to email, SMS and push notification campaigns.

Up until now, marketers have been using workarounds to see both sets of data at the same time; the partnership will likely ameliorate this issue, particularly for smaller brands that have less resources.

Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials enables small sales teams to start instantly, work smarter, sell faster and effortlessly scale as they grow. Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials is generally available today and priced at $25 per user per month. With Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials, small businesses can:

Sell smarter with Einstein artificial intelligence built in: Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials is infused with Einstein, empowering small businesses to automate basic sales activities and work smarter. Einstein Activity Capture automatically keeps customer records up-to-date without any tedious data entry by connecting a user's email and calendar. As a result, they can save time, close business faster and identify new opportunities.

Sell faster with Lightning and the Salesforce App: Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials has a consumer-like experience optimized for any device. Relevant information is surfaced on each screen to streamline processes and make workflows more intuitive. 

Scale as you grow with a complete platform: Because Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials is built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, small businesses don’t have to worry about outgrowing their CRM—they can upgrade quickly and easily. 
And as part of the strategic partnership we announced with Google this week, Salesforce Essentials customers will get three months of G Suite by Google Cloud at no cost. With Salesforce Essentials and G Suite, small businesses can connect their email, calendar, and more to save time, organize their workload and build richer communications. 

Google and Salesforce announced a massive strategic partnership today that’s aimed at driving value across their mutual customers.

As part of the deal, Salesforce plans to use Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a preferred partner to power the tech titan’s international expansion. Google, for its part, will use Salesforce as its preferred CRM provider for selling its cloud services.

In addition, Salesforce is working to integrate its data with Google’s G Suite productivity service, so joint customers will be able to more easily access Salesforce information within Gmail, Google Sheets and other products. Joint customers will also be able to connect Salesforce’s sales and marketing software with Google Analytics 360, the paid version of the popular analytics service.

"Customers of Salesforce software will soon be able to further personalize their environments, like providing custom color schemes and logos for their corporate users, so the software hews closer to a company’s corporate identity. In addition, businesses will be able to provision and deploy their own white-labeled version of Salesforce applications built using Lightning components into the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

That means businesses will be able to more easily create task-specific apps that integrate with their Salesforce data, while still being able to brand them and launch them independently.

Speaking of Lightning, Salesforce’s drag-and-drop interface builder, it’s getting an upgrade with the ability to support dynamic pages so that administrators can set up custom logic that shows or hides elements when conditions are met."

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/salesforce-bets-big-on-personalization-with-software-updates/

"Salesforce is launching a new feature that uses machine learning to let customers make predictions based on data stored with the tech titan’s software. Einstein Prediction Builder is designed to take any of the fields that users have set up inside a piece of software — like Salesforce’s Sales Cloud CRM — and generate predictions for future outcomes based on saved data.

The feature is designed to make it easier for companies and users who don’t have machine learning expertise to reap the benefits of the current explosion in AI technology. Custom predictions can be set up through a visual editor and don’t require coding of any sort."

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/salesforce-aims-to-make-ai-predictions-easier-for-its-customers/

"Salesforce announced plans today to bring automated bots to its Einstein AI platform. The bots, which can include conversational AI for natural language interactions, will be deployed on apps and websites to give businesses the ability to deliver services to customers. Einstein bots are currently being used by a handful of pilot customers, like Hulu, and will be made generally available to Salesforce customers in mid-2018."

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/salesforces-einstein-ai-debuts-bot-platform-for-businesses/

"Quip, the collaboration service owned by Salesforce, announced today that it will be opening a developer platform so third parties can create custom document add-ins. This is designed to let customers work more effectively by adding functionality that they need, like project planning tools."

https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/salesforces-quip-launches-a-developer-platform-to-promote-collaboration/ 

IDC in an annual study commissioned by Salesforce says the ecosystem of customers and partners will drive the creation of 3.3 million new jobs and more than $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide by 2022. In addition, by 2022 the Salesforce partner ecosystem will gain $5.18 for every dollar Salesforce earns. To generate revenue you need a product, you need a business model, and you need a customer channel. You need more like a strong brand but let’s stay with those three. Salesforce does not help companies build products or services. Foxconn, Flex, IDEO and many Tier 1 and 2 suppliers do.  It does not help you with your business model or order entry or billing. It does help you with your channel, but far less than you may think. It helps with direct sales force automation, much less with resellers, franchisees, store or ecommerce sales. It helps with digital marketing but the world still spends way more on trade promotions and analog advertising on TV, billboards and other media. So taking credit for generating customer revenues seems to be a stretch.

To that end, 57% of marketers say using artificial intelligence (AI) is essential for creating 1-to-1 marketing experiences; however, actually delivering these experiences is difficult. More often than not, AI is still seen as the domain of data scientists with extensive training. Without access to these data gurus, many marketers think they must rely on backward-looking analytics, often using manual (or somewhat manual) processes to do things like identifying target audiences or choosing the content and offers they send.

But AI isn’t just for data scientists anymore. By embedding it into the apps and workflows where power users spend their time, Salesforce Einstein is democratizing AI and putting it in the hands of marketers, making things like predicting consumer engagement and campaign planning easier.

We’re excited to announce two exciting new releases as we come up to Dreamforce 2017: Pardot Campaign Influence Attribution models and Salesforce Engage for Outlook.

Pardot’s Campaign Influence Attribution Models allow you to leverage out-of-the-box attribution models to track the impact of your marketing campaigns, and easily understand which campaigns are building more pipeline or closing more deals.

Engage for Outlook is an integration with Lightning for Outlook that allows users to enable tracking for increased visibility into which prospects engage with emails sent from their inbox. This engagement data is pushed into Engage Alerts, Engage Reports, and Engage Team Reports so reps can reach out the moment a prospect shows interest. Users can also view a contact’s lead score and engagement history from their inbox, so they can send more relevant emails. You can use all of this alongside Salesforce functionality like creating tasks, inserting Salesforce templates, and viewing matching records (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, custom objects) from Salesforce for the contacts you’re emailing.

We’re excited to announce two exciting new releases as we come up to Dreamforce 2017: Pardot Campaign Influence Attribution models and Salesforce Engage for Outlook.

Pardot’s Campaign Influence Attribution Models allow you to leverage out-of-the-box attribution models to track the impact of your marketing campaigns, and easily understand which campaigns are building more pipeline or closing more deals.

Engage for Outlook is an integration with Lightning for Outlook that allows users to enable tracking for increased visibility into which prospects engage with emails sent from their inbox. This engagement data is pushed into Engage Alerts, Engage Reports, and Engage Team Reports so reps can reach out the moment a prospect shows interest. Users can also view a contact’s lead score and engagement history from their inbox, so they can send more relevant emails. You can use all of this alongside Salesforce functionality like creating tasks, inserting Salesforce templates, and viewing matching records (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, custom objects) from Salesforce for the contacts you’re emailing.

Salesforce is rolling out a new Marketing Cloud integration with Facebook that aims to help businesses take advantage of Facebook's B2B digital advertising channel.

It's called Salesforce Lead Analytics for Facebook, and as the name suggests, it lets marketers measure the effectiveness of targeted ad campaigns. The system can pull engagement stats from Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network and create performance visualizations against key marketing automation metrics.

Expect to devote two hours per week to these activities for every 100 users you have: 

Unlocking user accounts or resetting passwords due to user forgetfulness.
Dealing with SSO, two-factor authentication, and certificate problems.
Adding new white-listed IP addresses.
Helping users develop or fine-tune reports so they yield meaningful metrics
Troubleshooting email campaigns, workflows, approval cycles, or auto-responders that generate excessive bounced mails.
Expanding or refining sharing rules and access privileges so records can be properly viewed and manipulated (while keeping the “special records” locked or hidden altogether).
Fixing data records that have somehow been set with record types or ownerships that make them inaccessible to users.

ProsperWorks, which provides a customer relationship manager (CRM) for G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work), announced today that is has raised $53 million to take on industry giant Salesforce. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, with participation from new investor GV (formerly Google Ventures), and returning investors Industry Ventures, Next World Capital, Storm Ventures, and True Ventures.

Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based startup focuses on helping sales managers and reps better manage their teams and workflows through integration with apps like Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. According to ProsperWorks cofounder and CEO Jon Lee, the number one priority is to make CRM more usable.

Salesforce is celebrating the one year anniversary of unveiling the Einstein artificial intelligence capabilities for its products with a new set of three features for users of its Sales Cloud services.

A new Einstein Forecasting feature will use machine learning to help sales managers provide more accurate predictions about how well their team will perform over the course of a given period, based on all the data stored in Salesforce.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring will provide them with information about which in-progress sales deals are most likely to succeed, along with those that are at risk of falling through. 

Einstein Email Insights uses natural language processing to parse the contents of sales reps’ emails and tell them what they need to respond to, plus why that particular message is important. 

1. Content Builder Sharing: This feature allows users to collaborate across accounts with the ability to share content and folders to one or more business units or across an enterprise.

2. Content Builder Default View in Email Studio: Content Builder is now the default view when you select the Content tab in Email Studio, making it easy to access and build emails in Content Builder. 

3. Content Builder Reference Block: The new Reference block allows customers to insert a “pointer” to an existing block. This feature ensures a block always uses the latest content. 

4. Advertising Studio Lead Analytics for Facebook: Customers now have the ability to measure the ROI of Facebook and Instagram campaigns all through the customer journey to actual revenue. 

5. Lead Capture for Marketing Cloud: Delete Lead Capture Tasks: This provides a simple way to either correct mistakes or remove outdated campaigns. 

6. Journey Builder SMS Activity Enhancement: This feature has received major enhancements to allow for easier cross-channel journey creation. 

7. App Inbox Messaging Template: MobilePush now includes a new template focused on helping customers drive app engagement with a push notification that produces a CloudPage sent directly to the app inbox.

8. Journey Builder Wait Activity Upgrade: This release improves the Journey Builder Wait Activity with a refreshed UI experience, as well as two new features: Wait for a Specific Date, and Wait by Attribute.

9. Social Studio Mobile: Cloud Drive Support for Publish: Social Studio Mobile now integrates with cloud drives so customers can access folders and content from iCloud, Google Drive and other installed 3rd party cloud-based drive applications to publish even more content.

10. @mention Other Workspace Users in Social Studio Publish: Customers can now tag other users in the audit trail of any scheduled, published, or pending Social Studio post directly in the post. Users are notified via in-app, mobile, and email notifications when someone tags them in a post.

New research from Salesforce shows that there’s hope on the horizon for people who want to understand information stored in databases without knowing the programming language typically used to query those systems. The company’s research arm laid out a new system called Seq2SQL in a research paper today that is designed to translate natural language questions and turn them into database queries written in the Structured Query Language, better known as SQL.

Systems like Seq2SQL could have a major impact on companies like Salesforce and other tech software providers. In the past, nontechnical employees would ask SQL experts to run queries for them, especially if they had complicated questions of company data. At least in theory, we should enter a future where it’s easier for people who aren’t SQL experts to learn what they need to know without asking someone else.