Articles by Denis

Let’s just say I pay attention to all things customer-related. In a store, I am likely to wonder about product placement. End caps have been known to draw my ire when I can’t see around them to confidently stroll into the main aisle. I am in perpetual amazement over sales, especially loss leaders. Can my occasional interest in a new tube of toothpaste really drive the price of steak or vice versa?...

We’re at a turning point in business, technology, and society, and I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it since the 1960s I can’t get into everything in one column, but what impresses me so far is how stately this revolution has been. If you think these days are chaotic, all I can say is you should have been around in 1968. My on...

I am seeing a pattern. Last time I looked at how Oracle’s generative AI is integrating into a variety of front- and back-office work areas like supply chain, HR, and, of course, CRM. Today, I want to examine Salesforce’s recently announced AI enhancements for its Field Service Suite The pattern that I see involves automating jobs....

Oracle on Thursday announced 50 new generative AI apps for its application suite that embed into existing business workflows across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service, as well as an expansion of the Oracle Guided Journeys’ extensibility. It seems like good stuff, but it also neatly demonstrates how you may need to take the good with the “what?” when looking at AI. I can explain...

Toward the end of last year, I was a guest on one of Paul Greenberg’s and Brent Leary’s shows on their new streaming network, PPN. There’s a lot of CRM content there, naturally, and I am always amazed at how they can coax executives from competing vendors to discuss big ideas and be nice to each other That was not always the case. I recall a ...

What was that? Obviously, that was 2023, which is now conveniently receding in the rearview A more focused and analytical answer would be that we just witnessed a turning point in our tech lives called the pivot to AI....

What a difference a decade makes. It seems only about that long ago that vendors were wrestling with providing the rudiments of automated triage for customer service. It was not often pretty, but they kept at it. Good thing, too The websites dedicated to service weren’t very good back then. They either couldn’t help at all, in which case you’...

Recently, Oracle and Microsoft jointly announced a cooperative pact to interoperate several of each other’s products to support Bing searches and other applications. This collaboration is not their first, but it is the biggest. The questions I have include whether this is significant and, if so, what it says about the future of CRM The joint anno...

There’s a changing of the guard going on in medicine that may be barely evident to most of us, but I suspect this change is simply part of the zeitgeist or tenor of the times and that nearly every aspect of our lives will be impacted by it, even in CRM In medicine, the talk is about a move from Medicine 2.0 to Medicine 3.0. When you go from two t...

I have been a gearhead forever. I am not talking about a certain affection for the short-block V8 either, though I suspect it all comes from the same root cause. The tech space is a whole gearhead ecosystem, just made for people like you and me Last week, I was all over Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) like a junkyard dog. I don’t pretend to und...

Even at this early point in the AI era, we may be seeing a divergence. On one side, we can easily see vendors bending over backward to deliver ethical AI apps and services, and on the other, a real conundrum. I am not an expert on anything, including AI, but I analyze things and report on what I see The significant early determinant for the AI indu...

Oracle CloudWorld happens this week in Las Vegas, and there will be lots of product announcements covering many things we don’t necessarily or directly care about in CRM. That used to be truer than it is now because, over the last few years, the software industry has been converging on its own singularity Back-office data drives front-office proc...

One of the knocks against Salesforce about a year ago was how it had bought up a number of companies and had not (yet) done a good job of integrating them. Sharks were circling, and private equity investors were offering free advice about how the company could help them become even richer A popular, if not very original, idea was to stop buying com...

Maybe it's just me, but I doubt it. Many people are upset with how social media rolled out and took over too many brains in Western civilization I am not writing a screed against social. Heck, I was an early advocate. Nor am I writing to disparage any Silicon Valley titan associated with social. You could make a strong case that they deserve their ...

Oracle kicks off CloudWorld in Las Vegas next week. While I am neutral on Las Vegas as a destination, it was plain to see 10 years ago that having both CloudWorld and Dreamforce in San Francisco in the span of roughly a month was asking a lot of the city I've often wondered why more tech vendors don't use Chicago and its conference centers. It's mi...

Salesforce tees up Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco next week. While it's a reincarnation of past events that took place without facemasks, much has changed in the last few years, both for the company and almost everything else in our culture. Some good, some not so much San Francisco could really benefit from all the tourist dollars the event brin...

Salesforce's secret weapon has always been an all-out effort to appeal to every stratum of the market. Whether with small businesses or enterprise-level organizations, they position themselves as a solution. They also cover major industry sectors, including finance and health care, to give a sense of breadth Salesforce is at it again, though you co...

We are soooo not in Kansas anymore The concept of the computer room, on-premises, once upon a time air-conditioned or possibly even water-cooled, and supporting a minimal number of flavors of COBOL is gone, gone, gone. It has been for many years, but its descendants are also now antiques....

As we contemplate what's next in CRM from such innovations as the rapid assimilation of artificial intelligence, it's good to consider where we've been and human nature. These two concerns overlap, and not necessarily in a good way A few years ago, there was concern about how some vendors could abuse CRM, and although we overcame at least some of t...

This is the year everything CRM changes, thanks to AI The importance of CRM seems a settled matter. We need it and the data it captures to support our customer-facing businesses wall to wall. AI is another dimension, and it may take time to get up to speed....