There has been a ton of news this week in the CRM arena, a lot of it coming from Salesforce, but plenty coming from other vendors and CRM suppliers including Infor.

We heard that Jabra (News - Alert), internationally renowned headset manufacturer, and Voice Assist have revealed an important partnership between them that will enable all employees at Salesforce to use the messaging system Chatter, email, talk on the phone, and update Salesforce records, all hands-free.

Jabra's customers can utilize Voice Assist's voice-to-text service that will increase productivity over both large and small companies. To get more of an understanding as to how this partnership will bring higher levels of productivity to companies, I spoke with Mogens Elsberg, CEO of Jabra, and Michael Metcalf, CEO of Voice Assist. See the full exchange here.

Additionally, we saw that Heroku, the cloud platform that powers Ruby on Rails, is set to come under the salesforce.comumbrella. The cloud computing giant will purchase Heroku for $212 million. 

As captured by the Business Insider in this post, Ruby on Rails is a programming language/platform used by a variety of startups due to its ease of use.

Heroku is a cloud platform available through Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) that is made especially for hosting the Ruby on Rails apps, making it popular with startups as well.

Some in the industry thought the most logical acquirer for Heroku was Amazon, especially since the popularity of the cloud platform with startups has been a huge part of the company’s success. The pairing between Salesforce and Heroku is a logical one, however, given the fact that Salesforce is all about the cloud.

In other news, Infor, a provider of business applications, has announced the general availability of CRM Epiphany Data Advisor.

The company launched E-Mail Advisor in August and has now released this second module in the Advisor family.

Infor’s latest release has the ability to streamline the process of collecting, consolidating and improving opt-in customer data throughout the global enterprise. Once the data is optimized it can then be used by all CRM Epiphany modules, or other business applications.

Eventually the data creates consistent and personalized customer interactions across all channels, including Web, smart phone, and e-mail.

Available for purchase, the Epiphany Data Advisor can solve the challenge large enterprises face in ensuring their end-customer data is complete, accurate, and comprised of the most relevant information.

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Juliana Kenny