Microsoft has announced it is purchasing Nuance Communications, a natural language to computer processing company, in a deal valued at $19.7 billion. "Nuance's popular healthcare-focused products and services will provide Microsoft an instant revenue stream and relationships with existing Nuance customers," noted Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT.

Even the most customer-centric businesses can overestimate their performance or miss the broad trends in customer behavior. That is why NICE inContact conducts annual surveys that track the customer experience from the perspective of businesses and consumers. CRM Buyer discussed the recent findings and related issues in more detail with the company's CEO Paul Jarman.

Engaging in disaster recovery requires a company to think about many things, but despite the long checklists that are created to accomplish DR, there are some areas that frequently get overlooked in business continuity and disaster recovery planning. With this in mind, it is imperative to address all areas of concern before a disaster strikes, not during or after the event.

With most workers continuing to work remotely, CRM has become an important tool for managing relationship risk. Financial firms have to deal with market and operational risk, consumer retailers have to focus on supply chain risk, and all companies have to keep an eye on economic risk. Relationship risk is no different, and the role of the CRM is right at the center.

Major information technology providers opposed to the broadening of class action litigation related to consumer protections have taken their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The companies are hoping the court will strike down a lower court ruling which makes it easier for consumers to file class action suits. The tech companies may not have to wait too long for a decision.

A report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation called on the U.S. government to take an active role in promoting industrial competitiveness, and to formulate an advanced industry and technology strategy, which should include a set of policies and programs explicitly designed to support specific industries and technologies.

Collaboration between employees, teams, and clients is more important than ever before, and new technologies and platforms are available to facilitate communication and group work. The E-Commerce Times checked in with experts in collaboration software and technologies to hear more about how people are now working together, both remotely and in person.

Cloud cybersecurity -- or a lack of it -- is feeding a frenzy of companies out of the public cloud. A similar concern about managing compliance obligations is keeping organizations from moving to the cloud in general. However, much of the growing concerns over cloud cybersecurity result from experiences with public and private cloud platforms. A trend toward hybrid cloud computing could be an approach to better ensure data security.

Sourcegraph has launched an automated internal coding tool that allows enterprises to automate and track large-scale code changes across all repositories and code hosts. The new tool, called Batch Changes, also provides developers and enterprises ways to manage the resulting change sets through checks and code reviews so they can be confident each change is merged. For software developers, this is game changing.

Personalization and automation, two of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of CRM practitioners, are all the rage for marketers these days. But only 14 percent of organizations are using artificial intelligence or machine language to automate their marketing campaigns. A survey by Rackspace Technology reveals that the majority of organizations worldwide lack the internal resources to support these high-powered CRM initiatives.

Nearly one-in-five rural Americans don't have broadband Internet access, but that could change with the use of carefully targeted subsidies through a process known as a reverse auction. A big, one-time capital expenditure administered through a reverse-auction program would attract larger, more efficient firms to the problem, noted ITIF Director of Broadband and Spectrum Policy Doug Brake.

In the old days you could identify weak spots in your business and purchase software systems designed to eliminate or at least to significantly reduce those liabilities. Performing an ROI analysis usually consisted of two parts: a before study to determine the business' steady state; and a post implementation analysis to determine improvement. Good as that sounds, such studies left out a lot.

Nvidia is in the process of working through regulatory approvals to buy Arm from SoftBank -- a technology holding company with mixed success husbanding its acquisitions. Let's explore this acquisition, the most significant regulatory hurdles the effort needs to overcome, and what might result once the two firms are one. We'll close with the product of the week: Nvidia's GeForce Now.

Half of consumers who originally planned to return to their pre-pandemic in-store shopping routines once coronavirus is under control now plan to stick with online shopping. That shift in preferences means that e-commerce merchants must keep up with trending ways to market, sell, and prevent fraud. Let's look at a few of the most important developments and see where they're going.

Those familiar with open source know that it works and comes with many benefits. A testament to the rising adoption of open source is the recent moves by software giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle into the open-source community. This corporate migration to open source is continuing as many organizations, both large and small, turn to open source in tough economic times.

Malicious online actors used email as their prime vehicle for delivering malware to their victims in the last quarter of 2020. The HP-Bromium Threat Insights Report found that 88 percent of malware was delivered by email into its targets' inboxes, many times evading measures at email gateways to filter out the infected correspondence.

As the CRM solution set continues to grow, it's likely that training systems will be increasingly important. That growth has the effect of converging vendor functionality at roughly the same place, making tertiary product attributes like training systems important differentiators. Taking this into account, the next big thing in CRM might not be a new customer-facing app -- but one that faces employees.

Globally, we throw out 50 million tons of electronics waste every year, which is the equivalent of 1,000 laptops every second. This month the EU addressed this problem with a comprehensive "right to repair" law to dramatically reduce this waste. Let's explore electrical hardware sustainability issues this week, and look at a laptop that seems to anticipate these new e-waste regulations.

Microsoft on Monday reported that multiple malicious actors were taking advantage of vulnerabilities in its Exchange software last week to attack systems at organizations that have failed to patch the flaws. The company attributed the attacks "with high confidence" to Hafnium, a group believed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China.

The United States government is trying to get smarter about getting smart. Throughout the federal government, and especially in defense and national security, artificial intelligence is getting an increased amount of attention, including the adoption of hefty AI budgets. That should lead to increasing contract opportunities for information technology vendors with high competence in AI.

Two CRM vendors made news recently. Zoho had an analyst conference that reminded us that many businesses don't benefit enough from verticalized suites; and Microsoft introduced several vertical industry systems, including one for nonprofits. One could say that Zoho and Microsoft displayed mirror image solutions in some ways. Let's take closer look.

A road map for continued U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence has been revealed in a 756-page report released by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Two years in the making, the report made a number of recommendations to make the United States a leader in the AI age, including an emphasis on the need for the U.S. to win the AI competition with China.

In a recent Linux Foundation blog post titled "Preventing Supply Chain Attacks like SolarWinds," the foundation's Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security, David A. Wheeler, adamantly pushed the need for software developers to embrace the LF's security recommendations. Given the magnitude of the SolarWinds hack, LinuxInsider asked Wheeler to dive deeper into how supply chain security standards might benefit from the LF's latest advice.

Desktop as a Service provider Shells offers a new component to virtual cloud computing. It brings Linux distros and Windows 10 to any computer, mobile device, and some game consoles, via any Web browser. The U.S.-based startup went online in the first quarter of last year. Since then, CEO and founder Alex Lee has been drumming up favorable responses from businesses, casual users, and Linux developers.

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise and it became just another big company. Then came the challenge of cloud computing.

Jeff Bezos last week announced he will be stepping down from his role of CEO Amazon. Bezos is following Microsoft's lead and putting his cloud executive Andy Jassy in charge of the company. Given that Microsoft was exceedingly successful with putting Satya Nadella in the same role, it would seem that this would be a slam-dunk success. But the issue is that Amazon is not Microsoft.

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, ramping up the data privacy threats they pose to government agencies and businesses alike. Governments both domestic and foreign need to step up efforts to pass legislation that bolsters technological defenses this year, warn privacy groups. Stiffer privacy laws are gradually being reviewed and signed into the U.S. market. But that process is mostly taking place at the state level.

Amazon gets a new chief executive this summer. Jeff Bezos plans to step down from that role and transition into a new job -- executive chair of Amazon. The chief of Amazon's cloud computing division, Andy Jassy, will become Amazon's new chief executive. Jassy served in that post in a temporary capacity along with another Amazon executive in recent years. The change will be effective in the third quarter, which starts in July.

Microsoft is set to step in with its Bing search engine should Google make good on its promise to cut service to Australia in response to a proposed law to make tech firms pay for news content produced by the country's media companies. Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he has spoken to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who is confident Bing could meet the needs of Australians should Google exit.

If you step back and look at what the tech sector has demonstrated to us through COVID, you can feel impressed. Early in the crisis vendors like Salesforce and Zoho began offering their products for free, or at low cost, to companies and end users suddenly faced with working at home. Oracle, Salesforce and others also developed tracking apps that could be easily deployed on the Web to help health authorities track exposure and quarantines.