云服务提供商Salesforce推出新玩法，促进预测营销
现在对于营销来说重要的已经不是客户在做什么了，而是客户下一步想做什么。这正是客户关系管理服务商Salesforce推出新服务的理念所在。
昨天，客户关系管理服务商Salesforce营销云服务推出了先期客户满意度的升级版：预测性决策(Predictive Decisions)。
该功能会检查一个匿名或已知客户的喜好，分析客户互动的轨迹，然后提供推荐内容和产品，或通过网站和电邮提供实时推荐。
“以前，信息和内容必须从第三方资源获得，”家具零售商Room & Board的网络客户体验主管Kimberly Ruthenbeck说，该公司使用了Salesforce的营销云服务。
她说，现在预测性决策功能让收集用户行为信息变得更容易了，因为信息和内容会实时传到平台上。另外，个性化过程是自动的。
通过电子渠道客户会获得定制的店内销售体验。当客户选择或拒绝推荐时，预测性决策会自动更新客户资料以反映这些喜好。
“过去营销人员对于使用预测性营销很挣扎，”Salesforce的产品营销副总裁Gordon Evans说。
现在，对于一位两周前买了一套灰色沙发的30多岁女性顾客，Room & Board的营销渠道能更容易地自动表示她可能会对一个刚上架的黑色枕头感兴趣。
Evans称新一代的预测营销要解决几个关键问题，包括传送多个来源客户信息的难题，新品推出的内容更新，以及在所用渠道和顾客旅程中的个性化推荐。
Salesforce以前营销云服务上的预测营销重点关注网站。“我们正在做的是把服务扩张到电邮和其他途径，让它使用起来更容易。”
对于卖家来说，事先知道顾客想要买什么很重要。Salesforce称新的预测功能可以让网站收入提高10%，转化率提高25%。
当然，如今“预测性”成了营销的一个常见修饰语，许多平台都宣称他们能提供产品推荐。Evans表示新功能与众不同，因为它是营销云服务原创的，顾客信息、新内容和推荐将实时传送到所有渠道。
“顾客与公司互动时想要相关的经验，”Salesforce咨询合作方Bluewolf的首席运营官Corinne Sklar说。
“预测性分析是通向智能新体验的入口，这种体验将彰显品牌和促进客户忠诚度。”她又表示Bluewolf最近关于Salesforce的报告发现后者将近四分之三的客户将增加在分析上的投资，以促成“有意义的顾客时刻”。
【文章来源VB，编译：菜蚁，首发钛媒体】
Salesforce pumps up its anticipatory marketing with new Predictive Decisions
It’s no longer just about what the customer does. It’s becoming more about what the customer wants to do next.
That’s the idea behind Predictive Decisions, the new level of preemptive customer satisfaction launched today on Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.
It looks at an anonymous or known customer’s preferences, analyzes the trail of customer interactions, and then offers recommended content, products, or offers in real time across such channels as websites and email.
“Before, data and content had to be pulled from third party sources,” Kimberly Ruthenbeck told me via email. She’s director of web customer experience at furniture retailer Room & Board, which uses the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Now, she said, Predictive Decisions makes it “much easier for us to implement the collection of user behavior” because data and content are streaming in real time into the platform. Plus, she noted, the personalization process is automated.
The customer gets a more “customized, in-store sales experience” across digital channels, she said. When the customer chooses — or rejects — the recommendations, Predictive Decisions automatically updates customer profiles to reflect those preferences.
“Marketers were struggling to use predictive marketing,” Salesforce VP of product marketing Gordon Evans told me.
Now, he said, it’s easier for Room & Board’s marketing channels to automatically suggest that a mid-30s woman who bought a gray sofa two weeks ago might be interested in a new black pillow that was just added to the catalog.
He said this new generation of the company’s predictive marketing required addressing several key challenges — including the difficulty of streaming multiple sources of customer data, content updates like new products, and the resulting personalized recommendations across all channels and across the entire customer journey.
The previous generation of predictive marketing on Marketing Cloud focused on websites, he said. “What we’re doing is expanding that into email and the rest of the channels, and making it easier to use.”
HaaS云服务提供商Altiscale完成B轮3000万美元融资
一提到Hadoop，大家可能就会想到数据中心复杂的内部设置，但Altiscale希望通过将全部服务转向云端，并提供Hadoop即服务（Hadoop-as-a-Service，简称“HaaS”），减少这种工作的复杂性。今天，Altiscale宣布完成B轮3000万美元融资，用以继续推进这一目标。
此轮融资由Northgate领投，红杉资本和General Catalyst Partners等现有投资方跟投，Altiscale的融资总额也由此达到4200万美元。
Hadoop是一个旨在帮助企业处理大数据的开源项目。
Altiscale同时还宣布，麦克·马希亚戈（Mike Maciag）加盟该公司担任首席运营官。马希亚戈具有丰富的从业经验，在加盟AltiScale以前已经在5家创业公司工作过。在这5家公司中，已有两家上市，有两家被收购，还有一家至今仍在运营。
马希亚戈曾见证了Hadoop开源平台的发展历程。他表示，自己之所以最终加盟AltiScale，是因为该公司已经打下了在这一领域获得成功的基础。正如他所说，AltiScale已经开发了相关产品，并证明该产品可以投入规模运营。现在，AltiScale需要更多的资金将这项工作推向深入，同时进军更广阔的市场。
此轮融资还表明投资方对AltiScale的产品创意非常有信心。之前1200万美元的融资令AltiScale有了今天这种成绩，现在他们需要更多的投资，创建一个组织来发现和支持更多的客户。
AltiScale在众多Hadoop厂商中之所以能脱颖而出，是因为该公司诞生于云时代，具有处理Hadoop工作负荷的明确目标。正如AltiScale创始人兼首席执行官雷米·斯塔塔（Raymie Stata）告诉我，运营Hadoop并不是一件轻松的事情，仍然需要付出大量艰辛。斯塔塔在雅虎开始了自己的职业生涯，雅虎旗下有一个庞大的组织来支持Hadoop相关项目，但大多数采用Hadoop平台的公司并没有这种资源。
斯塔塔表示，这也是他创建Altiscale的主要原因之一。通过将服务放入云端，Altiscale可以将Hadoop推向更广阔的受众，在客户遭遇一些不可避免的问题时，他们完全可以信赖Altiscale的服务。有时，Altiscale会在处理阶段发现问题，有时则是客户主动上报问题，因此客户不是被迫自己去追踪问题，然后留给Altiscale来解决。
斯塔塔称，解决问题的时间可以从几天缩短至几小时，因为他的公司完全专注于Hadoop。相反，对于大多数IT部门来说，这是另一个他们需要解决的问题。
值得一提的是，Hadoop近来已成为一个热门领域。另一家Hadoop厂商Hortworks最近宣布，该公司将提交S-1文件，迈出公开上市的第一步。去年3月份，Cloudera宣布该公司的估值超过了40亿美元。
Altiscale Lands $30M To Continue Building Hadoop Cloud Service
When you think of Hadoop, you probably think of a complex on-premises set up in your data center, but Altiscale wants to reduce some of that complexity by moving the whole thing to the cloud and offering Hadoop as a service. Today it got $30M in Series B funding to continue that quest.
The round is led by Northgate, with participation from previous investors Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners. Today’s funding brings Altiscale’s total raised to $42M.
Hadoop is an open source project designed to help companies process big data.
The company also announced it brought Mike Maciag on board to be its Chief Operating officer. Maciag is a seasoned industry veteran with experience at five startups before joining AltiScale. He indicated two had gone public, two were sold and one was still operating.
Maciag, who has seen this process before, says what attracted him to Altiscale was that they have the pieces in place to succeed. As he explained, the company has created the product and proven it works at scale. Now, they need more money to bring that to the next level and take it to a broader market.
And presumably, it shows investor confidence in the idea. The first $12M got them to this point, but they needed a significant investment to build out an organization to find and support more clients.
What makes Altiscale unusual among Hadoop vendors, is that it was born in the cloud with the express purpose of processing Hadoop workloads. As company founder and CEO Raymie Stata told me, running Hadoop is not a simple matter and it’s still a bit rough around the edges. He got his start at Yahoo! which has a huge organization supporting its Hadoop efforts, but most companies trying to work with Hadoop don’t have that luxury.
He says that’s one of the main reasons he created Altiscale. By putting the service in the cloud, it brings Hadoop to a much wider audience and customers can lean on his company when they hit those inevitable issues. Sometimes the company picks them up in the processing stage and sometimes it’s in the form of a help ticket from the customer, but instead of being forced to track down the problem themselves, customers can leave it to Altiscale to do that.
And he says, that process of solving the problem can be reduced from days to hours because his company is entirely focused on Hadoop. Whereas for most IT departments it’s just another problem among many to track down.
It’s worth noting that Hadoop has been a hot commodity lately. Just recently Hortworks, another Hadoop vendor announced it was going public by filing an S-1. Last March Cloudera announced a valuation of more than $4B.
来源：TC
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