Posts on Mar 2018

Salesforce buys Mulesoft for $6.5 billion

Salesforce.com Inc, the cloud-based CRM company is continuing its recent acquisitions with the announcement that they will purchase Mulesoft for approximately $6.5 billion. The sale is expected to close at the end of July 2018.

The acquisition of Mulesoft will allow Salesforce to target specific sectors such as health care, financial services and government agencies and expand their Platform-as-a-Service portfolio of products and allow their customers to change and innovate faster, deliver better customer experiences, and increase their own operational efficiency.

Mulesoft’s current customers include such names as Coca-Cola, Barclays and Unilver, providing them with a platform for building application networks that connect enterprise applications, data and devices, both cloud and on-premise.

These platforms enable companies to build applications that suit their specific needs, and pull together data and applications from different sources. The addition of Mulesoft’s technology will allow Salesforce to create an integrated cloud service that combines the best of traditional in-house corporate computing with data and apps from the public internet.

Mulesoft technology makes it much easier for a company that wants to combine various apps, for example, Google Maps, and digital payment capabilities such as those from Braintree, with older software programs and data by pulling everything together, whereas without this technology a company would need to write custom code which may, or may not, even be possible for them.

Salesforce’s goal to double its annual revenue by 2022 to $22 billion will be helped by this purchase, as Mulesoft has been rapidly expanding by connecting applications, data sources and devices using in-house servers or public cloud providers for clients such as McDonalds Corp.

The purchase of Mulesoft will be Saleforce’s largest acquisition ever, and follows its recent acquisition of CloudCraze, the provider of B2B e-commerce technology built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform. It also acquired Demandware in 2016, to offers a retail industry focused Commerce Cloud e-commerce platform. With MuleSoft, it will be able to provide customized integrations of multiple applications to better compete in the business software market.

As both Salesforce and Mulesoft continue their combined technology development, they aim to accelerate customers’ digital development, enabling them to utilize data, cloud apps and devices for a better connected customer experience.

Learn about xocbox integrated enterprise architecture technology.

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Same Day Delivery Shipping Wars Heat Up

In December 2017 we learned that Target had acquired Shipt for $550m in order to let Target customers order groceries and other products online and have them shipped to their home addresses from nearby Target stores.

The goal of this acquisition is to allow Target to offer same day delivery from approximately half of its stores by mid-2018, adding even more stores by the holiday season.

Not all categories of products will be included but it will start with groceries, electronics and other household goods and plans to include all product groups by the end of 2019.

Today Bloomberg reported that Amazon is considering acquiring some of the properties left vacant by the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us. There is no information on what exactly Amazon plans to do with these stores, but it could continue to expand its bricks and mortar store operations and expand its bookstores which also serve as retail outlets for its Echo devices.

Another possibility for Amazon is that the acquisition of more retail outlets would allow for a bigger network to place inventory closer to where shoppers live, and would allow faster delivery to ecommerce shoppers in more areas.

Amazon has already placed merchants under pressure with the amazing speed and success of its Prime delivery, and as Amazon’s advancement with drone deliveries continues, the competition to keep up with faster delivery times grows more fierce.

Amazon’s goal is to develop a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that can deliver packages to shoppers in under 30 minutes, and today it was reported that it has been granted a patent for a delivery drone that can respond to human gestures, with the hope that this will help Amazon to figure out how drones will interact with customers who are in the vicinity of their doorsteps.

Walmart’s approach is slightly different, but equally important. Walmart announced that it is planning to put Fedex Office locations in 500 of its stores over a two year period. Not only will they provide the usual FedEx services, but Walmart customers can also have online orders that are being delivered by FedEx held at a Walmart store for pick up.

As big box retailers think or more ways to get products to our doorsteps in the quickest possible time, the shipping challenge continues for niche online stores to compete.

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EDI for Yahoo Stores Eliminates Data Entry

As ecommerce stores try to compete with Amazon and Walmart, they continue to seek ways to not only speed up the process from the time the customer places an order to actually receiving the product at their door, but also try to cut their own costs and become more efficient.

These two scenarios present a challenge because at first glance it appears that it is difficult to present the customer with a more efficient process from purchase right through to delivery, and lower administrative costs at the same time.

Yet xocbox has helped Yahoo Store Merchants do this by offering an EDI solution which enables them to eliminate some manual tasks, and frees up employees’ time so they can work on higher value projects.

Unlike some of the web-EDI solutions offered to online stores, the EDI solution that xocbox offers Yahoo stores is a fully integrated product which means that you do not have to re-key data into a third party product in order to pass the data on to the EDI trading partner.

A great benefit to Yahoo merchants is that this has allowed them to trade with suppliers who will only sell to them if they use EDI, enabling them to offer a much greater selection of products, and increase their sales revenue.

xocbox provided the back-end system required to achieve this, and worked with their suppliers to ensure that transactions were processed correctly. Once all testing was complete, they were up and running with a new supplier. No additional staff or training was required by the store to do this, and they were able to introduce a new line of products to their store.

With xocbox EDI Yahoo stores are able to manage their orders, and also product onboarding and inventory.

By transacting with your partners electronically you can save time, offer a greater range of products, and free up time to do other valuable tasks within your business.

If this sounds like something that would work for your store, learn more about the Benefits of xocbox EDI products here, or call xocbox at 858-752-3803.

For those looking to automate just about everything – from product onboarding, taking orders, and shipping products – read about the xocbox No Touch Store, where you literally don’t have to touch a thing.

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Amazon Competes for Government Contracts

When you mention Amazon to many people they immediately think of Amazon shopping and Prime delivery, but not as many are aware of the huge inroads that Amazon has made over the past years into cloud computing.

It has been reported that the Pentagon has opened a competition for a multi-billion-dollar cloud services contract, which many of the big players such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle fear will favor Amazon.com Inc.

Many of the companies looking to compete for government contracts had been pushing for the use of multiple cloud providers, however, the Pentagon announced on March 7 that it was planning to go forward with a single company.

US Department of Defense Chief Management Officer, Jay Gibson, has confirmed that this will be a multi-billion-dollar contract due to the Defense Department’s current technology needs.

The Pentagon confirmed that it intends to strengthen its use of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things and for this reason is switching to cloud services.

As Amazon has already won two huge Defense Department contracts for cloud services, others in the industry believe it is in a good position to win this contract. Whilst the Pentagon’s contracting office stated that they had no preference in contractors, offering the contract to a single vendor, not only causes those who do not win the contract to be locked out of the market for 10 years, it also creates problems for existing government contract vendors, such as Oracle.

Oracle currently has long-term contracts with several government agencies that use its database to store information on their own systems, and switching to cloud computing, would seriously affect Oracle’s traditional source of revenue.

In February of this year a contract was awarded to REAN Cloud LLC, an Amazon partner for a reported value of $950 million, and although this contract was later challenged by Oracle and then reduced to $65 million, it still worries some that Amazon is now the leader in cloud services.

There is no question that the Pentagon’s planned transition to the cloud will threaten on-site database providers such as Oracle and IBM, and while other vendors plan to emphasize their strengths to win this contract, it will be interesting to see which company is ultimately awarded the contract.

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Google Shopping Ads No Longer Available on Some Platforms

Google Shopping ads have continued to grow over the past few years with retail marketers spending 36% more on these ads during the third quarter than they did in the same period a year earlier.

However, today is the day that Google will no longer make the Google Shopping ad integration available to Bigcommerce, Prestashop and Magento store merchants, and once again store owners are having to change their business practices to fit in with new rules introduced by Google.

Store owners for these platforms were sent an email in February advising them that their ecommerce platform API integration with Google Shopping ads would be ending on March 20.

The API integration is going away in order to focus on other integration solutions with the goal of offering a more seamless onboarding experience for Google Shopping ads. The API connected a merchant’s catalog of products with the Google Merchant Center in order to create the Shopping ads, whereas the new method involves retailers exporting their product data into a feed and then manipulating the feed to adhere to Google’s feed specifications.

The logic behind this is that Google is hoping to improve the data that is sent to the Google Merchant Center as the data will be more uniform as it conforms to Google’s specifications, whereas the data that merchants sent via the API was simply the data that merchants’ displayed on their own websites. The website data was not usually optimized for Google Shopping with titles, for example, excluding a great deal of the salient information that shoppers were searching for.

Those who were relying on the API integration will now have to find a new way to export their product data into a feed and this may, or may not, turn out to be a problem for retailers in the long run. There are also several free and third party apps that can fill this gap for merchants of these three platforms.

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