The San Francisco-based cloud giant Salesforce has reached an agreement to buy Tableau Software Inc. in an all-stock deal valued at $15.7 billion. By acquiring Tableau, which provides easy-to-use tools for data visualization and management, Salesforce has positioned itself as the latest major technology company to play an important role in helping enterprises analyze data, make smarter decisions, drive intelligent, connected customer experiences, and facilitate innovation. “We are bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform. Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers,” stated Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce. “It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers – bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world. I’m thrilled to welcome Adam and his team to Salesforce.” Currently, Tableau has more than 86,000 business customers around the world, including Charles Schwab,…
The problems for the social networking giant Facebook continue to mount as yet another data-sharing scandal has exploded. The New York Times (NYT) has published a thorough investigation detailing Facebook’s data sharing practices, and reported that the social network provided some well-known tech companies with access to hundreds of millions of users’ data without their consent. Interviews with former Facebook employees and its corporate partners, as well as hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the NYT, confirmed that Facebook made the questionable arrangements with partners such as Amazon, Spotify, Netflix and Microsoft. These alliances enabled the companies to “read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread”. The records revealed, that “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent. The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information…