SaaSGenius News Digest September 16, 2022

Salesforce launches customer 360 innovations to help businesses push efficient growth

automation technologies

Leading this week’s top stories is cloud-based software giant, Salesforce. 

Salesforce has unveiled new Customer 360 innovations that will provide businesses with powerful intelligence and automation technologies. 

The American cloud-based software company expects these innovations to drive efficient growth and deliver personalized customer experiences at scale, helping customers do more with less.

Salesforce’s own research has suggested automating manual tasks helps businesses provide better customer and employee experiences. Different types of companies can benefit from intelligence and automation technology, and with these innovations, sales teams can use bots to answer customer questions and close deals faster.

Salesforce says its Salesforce Customer 360 can be the single source of truth for every customer. The solution delivers end-to-end automation and AI on a low-code, highly scalable platform. It connects data across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more so companies can personalize every interaction and drive efficient growth.

Salesforce has continued to roll out a product roadmap with additional enhancements to Customer 360, enhancing its AI and automation components. The company has the lofty aim that its 360 platform becomes that single source of truth for enterprises.

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machine-learning software

Next up, Adobe announced that it has provided an answer to Netflix’s password-sharing problem.

The company recently announced its Primetime Account IQ product for measuring, managing, and monetizing credential sharing. Adobe estimates that sharing account credentials between multiple households costs video streaming services in the US around $25 billion (R434.82 billion) in annual revenue.

As the biggest streaming service in the world, Adobe reckons Netflix loses around $9 billion in revenue every year due to the practice.

Adobe said current approaches to deter people from password-sharing, such as repeatedly requesting login information, enforcing strict device limits, limiting concurrent connection limits, and using multi-factor authentication, are too irritating. 

Instead, it proposes using sophisticated machine-learning models to extract behavioral patterns in account usage and detect potential credential sharing.

Adobe said its Prime Account IQ system could collect data on how many devices are used on a single account and how many individuals are actively using it. It will also consider geographical locations — including distinct locations and span.

This will allow Netflix and other streaming services to identify problematic accounts and roll out solutions to changing their behavior.

Zoom plans a move into email and digital calendars

Zoom is set to diversify into email and digital calendars in an attempt to challenge larger rivals that have sought to dent the video conferencing group’s ubiquity for remote workers.

As competitors build up their own video chat services, Zoom is working to broaden its offering. Both Google and Microsoft offer users a suite of online tools, including email and diary services, as well conferencing platforms.

The Information reports that the apps have supposedly been in development for the past two years, with the company referring to them as “Zmail” and “Zcal” internally.

A possible unveiling of the apps could happen at the Zoomtopia conference in November 2022.

Microsoft Team to allow real-time document signing during the meetings

Tech giant Microsoft has created a sample app for Teams that allow people to sign documents during remote meetings.

Microsoft noted that the app could be adapted to work with other scenarios that require signing off, such as reviewing and approving code or working together on a document. The sample app was made by Teams Ecosystem Engineering as a proof of concept aimed at independent software vendors (ISVs) or other customers implementing it.

The entire project is available and documented on GitHub, which should help organizations that would like to use it within meetings. 

According to the report, the app allows users to add a document to a meeting to be reviewed or signed by attendees. It supports Teams’ single-sign-on (SSO) for authentication.

Zendesk launches new customer sentiment and intent functionality powered by machine learning

Zendesk Inc. this week announced that Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, two new AI solutions empowering businesses to triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale.

By democratizing access to these solutions, companies can see value in minutes by understanding intent and sentiment through account-specific, data-driven models that are customized for individual use cases and drive faster resolutions.

This new approach to applying machine learning is intended to create more personalized and informed interactions to better serve customers.

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Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave joins Amazon Web Services to help process transactions and analytics for users

Oracle recently announced that MySQL HeatWave, which is the only service that combines OLTP, machine learning, analytics, and machine learning-based automation within a single MySQL database, will be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This week, the multinational computer technology corporation announced that this plan has been actualized. 

With this announcement, AWS users can now run transaction processing, analytics, and machine learning workloads in one service, without requiring time-consuming ETL duplication between separate databases such as Amazon Aurora for transaction processing and Amazon Redshift or Snowflake on AWS for analytics and SageMaker for machine learning.

DoControl Joins Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

DoControl, the automated Software as a Service security company, this week announced that it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program as an integrated technology partner, giving Google Workspace customers additional layers of preventative data access security controls to protect business critical assets in Google Drive.

As a Google Cloud technology partner, DoControl offers customers a solution that integrates with Google Drive to help secure shared data and files accessed by identities and entities across internal employees, third party collaborators, and third party OAuth applications.

According to the CEO and Co-Founder of DoControl, Adam Gavish, applying SaaS Security Workflows to Google Drive is important for all organizations, so that they can bolster the protection of sensitive company data and files, no matter their size.

Akuity launches platform to help DevOps solve common Kubernetes issues

Lastly on this week’s news roundup, Akuity.io, the enterprise company for Argo, announced earlier this week the general availability of the Akuity Platform, a fully-managed SaaS service for simpler, safer and faster Kubernetes application delivery, using Argo.

Kubernetes, Argo, and GitOps are essential to modern application delivery, though operational complexities remain a challenge. The new Akuity Platform is built on Argo, and employs a unique agent-based hybrid architecture to provide better insights into Kubernetes-based infrastructure, strengthen cluster security, improve scalability and realize significant cost savings.