New Product Addresses The Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data World

The convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data (analytics), and video/unified comms changes the playing field from transactional applications to engagement applications.  The result – a sea change of new data types from structured and unstructured sources.  With greater volumes of data, demand for information shifts from real time to right time inside and outside the enterprise.  Context by process, by roles, by location, and by any other segmentation requires a robust MDM solution to improve the return on #bigdata.  Unfortunately, many master data management solutions have not been designed to handle this new world of business led requirements.

Epicor held its annual Insights user conference this week in Las Vegas. This was the first gathering for customers of both Epicor and Activant since the two firms merged last year. Although Epicor made many announcements, in this blog post I prefer to focus on three elements of Epicor's strategy: Epicor's "new culture," its vision to preserve customers' investment in Epicor's products, and its strategy to adopt Microsoft Azure as its go-foward cloud infrastructure.

Today Jive Software announced a major update to their social business platform, introducing several new features and a new free 30 day cloud based trial. Below is a summary of today's announcements and my thoughts based on conversations I had with Jive's CTO Matt Tucker and VP of Product Marketing Nathan Rawlins prior to the launch.

I'm excited to report that Bedford Funding has acquired enterprise collaboration software vendor Socialtext. Bedford Funding is a private equity firm who over the last few years has invested in several companies and assembled them into the talent management platform, Peoplefluent.

Today Box announced several enhancements to their platform and partner ecosystem, including:

Today Yammer announced several new partner integrations, including Microsoft Dynamics. The MS Dynamics integration allows CRM related events such as new opportunities or updates to account records to be broadcast into the Yammer activity stream enabling people to discover and discuss the event.