In another busy week for the CX sector, Salesforce is reportedly on the cusp of acquiring Informatica, Microsoft Dynamics' product prices are going up while Vonage's revenue is going down, and Zendesk has announced a number of AI-powered advancements.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Is Close to Acquiring Informatica, Reports
Salesforce is on the brink of snapping up Informatica, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
The latter publication even suggested that the two companies could reach a deal before the end of the week, citing “people familiar with the matter”.
However, the reports didn’t include a rumored price point, with Informatica’s market cap currently sitting pretty at $11BN.
That comes after a positive start to 2024 for the cloud data management player – with its stock rising from under $27 at the beginning of the year to above $38.
Indeed, Informatica is likely benefitting from AI in the enterprise, which gathers momentum as AI test drives – fuelled by the GPT hype – accelerate into AI deployments.
Informatica’s data integration and management platform supports these deployments by allowing companies to pull on, order, and refine their customers’ data.
With such a platform, Salesforce could bolster the existing features within Data Cloud, which fuels the AI models that swarm its Einstein 1 Platform – launched in September 2023 (Read on...).
Microsoft Dynamics Products Will Cost Up to 16.7% More from October
Microsoft has announced sizable price hikes for its Dynamics solutions, with some rising by as much as $30 per month.
The new costs will come into effect from October 1, 2024, marking Microsoft Dynamics’ first price change in five years.
The average price increase across all Dynamics products will be 12.6 percent, with the biggest increases prevalent across Finance, Commerce, and Supply Chain Management – all of which will see a $30 or 16.7 percent rise.
At the other end of the scale, the product least impacted by the changes will be Microsoft Relationship Sales, where users will still experience a 9.26 percent hike.
In discussing the company’s new price model, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Business Applications and Platform, Bryan Goode, highlighted the benefits that customers have enjoyed since the last price increase in a blog post:
As we look ahead, our commitment to our customers is to continue to offer the most value and highest return on your investment in business applications, helping to fuel digital transformation.
While the announcement did not explain why some products will increase significantly more than others, it did confirm that the increase would impact new and existing customers globally as of October 1, 2024 (Read on...).
