Enterprise software vendor SAP has agreed to purchase experience survey company Qualtrics for $8 billion. SAP sees the deal as accelerating a new “experience management” software category “similar to market-making shifts in personal operating systems, smart devices and social networks.” That’s a lot to expect.
Cloud-based customer service platform Zendesk has launched Sunshine, an open standards-based CRM platform that could be a serious competitor to Salesforce and Oracle. Sunshine runs on Amazon Web Services, can ingest data from any source, supports custom objects, and supports apps from outside developers. Zendesk says 60,000 custom apps already run on the system. It has further seeded the market with its own sales force automation and data analytics apps.
Pyze analyzes mobile app users with choropleths (geographical heat maps) which is definitely a term to drop the next time you’re trying to impress that blind date who turns out to be a data scientist.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.