Hacked LinkedIn post puts further pressure on Salesforce over attitudes to race in the workplace Near ubiquitous SaaS CRM pusher Salesforce got a rude awakening this week when its carefully curated image of a business addressing racial equality was shattered by its clearly hacked LinkedIn page. “Black lives still f**king matter,” read the message shortly before it was taken down, according to a report from CNBC. A …
Just read Vivianne Castillo's resignation letter.
I must say that it ranks highly in terms of hyperbole and broad-brush accusations, but there's nothing in there to distinguish it from an attention-seeking child not getting the attention it craves.
Do we live in a world where unsubstantiated, hyperbolic accusations are accepted uncritically? Or 'twas ever so?
Yes we live world where all accusations are accepted uncritically especially if they fit someone's narrative. But Silly Valley and its imitators has a well documented serious problem with toxic work places. This makes the allegations, while suspicious in their breadth, somewhat believable as they sort of fit the known pattern of Silly Valley toxic work places.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has doubled down on his company's stance on working from home and flexible working, that great pandemic debate.
Following widespread WFH enforced by global COVID-19-related lockdowns, opinion is divided between those welcoming the new normal of work-where-you-like and those who see numbers coming through the office door as a proxy for productivity.
Those in the latter camp include Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon – who has taken several opportunities to insist that his staff get back to the office full time – and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted the temptation of coffee and cheese presented a serious threat to the nation's post-Brexit economic success.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba has spun out a business called Lingyang Intelligent Service Company that aims to deliver "data-as-a-service."
Lingyang starts its life with assets adapted from tools developed for Alibaba’s own extensive operations, which span e-commerce, a public cloud, logistics, web portals, payments, and plenty more besides.
The Chinese company has over 1.3 billion annual active customers – more than a billion in China. Serving all those customers – and their many transactions – has necessitated development of some pretty slick tools.
Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and Teams are set to automatically load data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRMs using a product launched by the Redmond-based software and cloud giant today.
Dubbed Viva Sales, the product is built on the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva — launched last year — and is designed to let sales teams tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications to allow data to be captured as a customer record in the CRM system.
Currently available on preview, the product syncs with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamic CRM out of the box, but customers of Oracle and SAP CRM product will have to wait for sufficient customer demand before Microsoft integrates the system with their sales software, Emily He, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications marketing, told The Register.
Networking kingpin Cisco is hiring more cautiously to indicate that it, like many peers, is taking note of macroeconomic red flags.
"It's a time to be prudent," Richard Scott Herren, Cisco senior veep and chief financial officer told the Nasdaq Investor Conference. "I think it is a time for everyone to be prudent… so we're doing the same."
The hot spots – or the "highest priority items for us" – including security, will continue to see investments in headcount, he said.
Salesforce has previewed a bunch of updates to its Customer 360 platform promising close integration with external data sources including Google ads, ecommerce marketplaces and social media.
Using Salesforce Customer Data Platform, the update is intended that clients will be able to use their internal data to create a customer profile to build marketing campaigns on Google Ads.
The CRM giant argues that joining data held on its system with Google Ads will help customers personalize marketing campaigns using first-party data instead of cookies and, in the future, incorporate more detailed analysis at the Customer Data Platform interface. The feature will be available in a few months, the company said.
A shareholder activist group has found that tech sector workers from minority ethnic backgrounds are more than twice as likely to have experienced explicit racism than employees in other sectors.
The study by Tulipshare is timed to coincide with the Salesforce 2022 Annual Virtual Stockholders Meeting, set to take place today, where Tulipshare has succeeded in securing a proposal onto the ballot.
Tulipshare, whose strapline is 'rethinking ethical investments', is set to request that Salesforce commissions an independent audit of the company's impact on civil rights, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The request follows a series of anecdotal accounts of racially based microaggressions among Salesforce workers, together with a perceived lack of progress on a racially balanced workforce.
The set of enterprise technologies acquired by Salesforce in recent years, together with its own applications, have proved "more difficult and expensive to govern than expected for many customers," says Gartner.
The global tech analyst offered a balanced view of the SaaS company in a research report, saying Salesforce was "strong" in both its strategy and corporate viability. However, its overall rating had fallen from "strong" to "positive".
For context, Gartner offers a five step rating, with the first three being "weak", "caution" and "variable." Salesforce's rating for products and services also slid, dropping from "strong" to "positive."
Around 4,000 Salesforce staff have signed an open letter calling for the CRM giant to stop working with the National Rifle Association, the powerful US gun-lobby organisation.
The calls to senior management at Salesforce come in the wake of the 24 May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two adults dead.
The letter sent to co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor, CFO Amy Weaver, and CMO Sarah Franklin has attracted more than 4,000 signatories, according to reports.
Microsoft's LinkedIn social network has agreed to settle allegations it systematically underpaid women in engineering, product, and marketing roles.
The US Department of Labor (DoL) on Tuesday announced the settlement on behalf of 686 female workers in California. The government said an evaluation conducted by DoL's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found that between March 1, 2015, though March 1, 2017, LinkedIn failed to provide equal pay for women in its San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, offices.
Specifically, LinkedIn was accused of violating Executive Order 11246, which prohibits federal contracts from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin. EO 11246 dates back to the Johnson administration in 1965 and has been amended since then. The enforcement action also reflects Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974.
A US judge has dismissed efforts by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to block the release of emails created and managed on a Salesforce system as part of an investigation into the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol building.
In a ruling released this week [PDF], District Judge Timothy Kelly rejected the RNC claim that the House Select Committee's efforts to access the emails could reveal its digital strategy and provide valuable competitive information.
"The Select Committee's demand is narrowly tailored to its interest," the ruling said. "As the Court has already explained, the Select Committee seeks reasonably relevant information from a narrow window during which the RNC sent emails promoting claims that the presidential election was fraudulent or stolen.
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