Oracle ties up with Slack: While Oracle has made a lot of news during its massive OpenWorld conference this week, one item in particular stands out. The company recently became a customer of red-hot workplace messaging startup Slack, and now the pair have inked a product integration agreement, as Reuters reports:
The partnership will allow workers to use Slack as the interface for Oracle’s sales, human resources and business software.
Slack entered the partnership to differentiate its messaging product among large corporations, a market the company has made a top priority since launching an enterprise-grade version of its messenger in January.
Slack is hoping the Oracle partnership will entice more corporations to choose its messenger over Microsoft Teams, Facebook Workplace and Atlassian Stride, all of which launched in the past year.
Oracle, meanwhile, said the partnership is key to serving younger professionals, many of which are accustomed to using messaging interfaces like Slack, Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.
POV: “Over the last few years we’ve seen that the value of enterprise social networks increases when integrated with core business processes, a topic I call purposeful collaboration," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "We’re now seeing a similar trend emerge in the highly competitive group messaging market, where the value of conversations goes up when the discussions can contain business objects and processes."
Oracle’s own product, Oracle Social Network (OSN) never got a lot of traction, so leveraging the popularity of Slack is a good move, Lepofsky adds. For Slack, this provides them another entry point into the enterprise market, enabling users of Oracle’s CX, HR, ERP and other products to collaborate within Slack channels.”
Oracle has 30,000 Slack seats of its own. It has made considerable efforts to overhaul its sales force, bringing in recent college graduates and training them on the job to sell its cloud products, with more experienced salespeople providing a mentorship role.
Salesforce links up with higher ed to push Trailhead training: Three years after launching Trailhead, its guided online training program, Salesforce is rolling out a version geared toward higher education students.
More than 70 institutions have signed up, including the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and the University of San Francisco. The program provides the Trailhead training content, mentorship from Salesforce employees and community groups.
Educators can include Trailhead content in a current class, or develop standalone ones. Salesforce has prepared instructional materials, such as slide decks and class formats, for teachers as well.
POV: The announcement, which Salesforce is making a few weeks before the big Dreamforce event, underscores how much Salesforce views the importance of training not only for existing customers, but as a market-seeding exercise.
Salesforce talks a lot about the "Salesforce economy," and in 2016 said its ecosystem will generate $389 billion in GDP and nearly 2 million jobs by 2020. Whether you quibble with those projections or not, Salesforce's rapid growth is unquestionable.
Trailhead was initially aimed at beginners and intermediate users of Salesforce's software, but over the past few years its content has grown to include much more sophisticated topics. It also remains free of charge, although users must create an account to be eligible to receive achievement badges and other gamification-related assets.
By pushing Trailhead into higher education, Salesforce follows a path well-worn by software vendors, who want to have college graduates hit the ground running with their technologies.
Salesforce is still making plenty of money with its official certification programs. But Trailhead's increasing popularity and recognition as a valid skills-builder may start blurring the line, cutting into that business. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce strikes the balance moving forward.
Ace Hardware buys majority stake in the Grommet: While Lowe's and Home Depot cast heavy shadows over the home improvement market, there is still a role for the likes of Ace Hardware, a cooperative of more than 5,000 stores around the world.
Ace has a venerable history, founded in Chiacgo in 1921. In contrast to the big box chains, most Ace stores are on the small side, located in neighborhoods rather than massive shopping plazas. The company has long touted its superior in-store customer service as a differentiator from larger competitors.
But Ace understands the importance of omnichannel commerce, and to that end has taken a majority stake in The Grommet, an online site that sells forward-thinking products developed by entreprenurs. Some of the Grommet's successes include FitBit, OtterBox and SodaStream. It has more than three million community members. Ace's majority stake builds on an existing partnership, as described by its announcement of the deal:
Ace Hardware and The Grommet first began working together in 2016 as part of a collaboration to bring new, unique and otherwise undiscovered products from independent Makers into select Ace stores.
“We both stand as strong advocates for the underdog. From the very beginning we have appreciated our alignment in support for and advancement of the independent maker,” said John Venhuizen, president and CEO, Ace Hardware Corporation. “Under Ace’s ownership, I believe The Grommet can offer our customers more of that which fuels global economies and makes America special - the unbridled creativity of the local entrepreneur.”
“The Grommet has often been called a ‘general store for innovation,’ and Ace is a trusted destination for the goods and services homeowners need to take care of their homes. That is a powerful combination,” said Jules Pieri, co-founder and CEO of The Grommet.
Ace will retain the Grommet's founders and plans to give it "considerable autonomy," according to a statement.
POV: The deal is interesting to say the least from a branding perspective, bringing together Ace's well-established but perhaps conservative image with the Grommet's hipster-driven mojo.
But the companies also share important core values. The vast majority of Ace's stores are independently owned under its cooperative corporate structure. That aligns well with the Grommet's focus on independent entrepreneurs, or "Makers" as product sellers are called.
The companies plan to emphasize the value of locality, both by advocating for local makers and featuring Grommet products with local relevance, they said in a statement.
It seems there are already natural synergies between Ace and Grommet users. Current Grommet customers visit Ace stores 50 percent more times than average Ace Rewards members, while spending nearly three times as much money, according to Ace retail analytics.
