Articles by Denis

Looking at the current assortment of customer relationship management functionality, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice recognition and chatbots, you might conclude that the tools are evolving to remove salespeople and others from direct customer contact -- and you wouldn't be wrong. What's surprising to me, though, is the ...

Salesforce will be celebrating its 20th birthday on March 8. Where did those decades go? "Time flies like an arrow," said Groucho. "Fruit flies like a banana." There it is.

I've recently been writing a lot about platforms -- not about any one in particular, but about the importance of platform to the future of what we all do in CRM and beyond. Platform provides a level of abstraction between machines and humans, who must get useful work out of them. Inventing the platform was like inventing the power loom or the prin...

Until recently, becoming a subscription provider was a big and expensive task. To get into the game, a vendor needed to build a subscription business model right next to its traditional businesses, so to speak, which typically involved building an e-commerce Web store and member site, organizing an online price list and catalog, and figuring out how to handle subscription business receipts, as well as shipping and dealing with returns.

What's the state of the selling profession today? In brief, it fluctuates significantly based on economic circumstances and a company's position in a category lifecycle. At the start of a category lifecycle, when vendors really need people who can educate and explain what a disruptive innovation actually does, salespeople are in demand and life is very good indeed. In a down economy, most selling suffers; in a recovery selling can be fun...

How do you build a software company? It's a trick question. There are certainly things you need to do and not do on the way to building a successful software company, but there are no recipes, especially in CRM where demand changes all the time. In my career, I've seen firsthand some of the ways that company builders succeed or fail, and to paraph...

The social media model has come under increased scrutiny following revelations of data misuse and news of executives reneging on some security commitments. People expecting to change the situation will need to address how social media works. This means changing not just the business model, which describes how a social media business makes money, b...

As markets mature, they trend toward oligopoly or even outright monopoly. There isn't much difference, because an oligopoly has several members instead of just one. Examples include electric power generation, an oligopoly made up of vertically integrated monopolies in most areas, and the airline industry -- an oligopoly made up of many airlines that may have monopolies in regional hubs. As monopolies and oligopolies gain strength, it becomes increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter a market...

NetSuite announced results of its sponsored study at this week's National Retail Federation show in New York, shedding light on technology adoption in a retail setting. The study suggests that merchants are not doing what customers would want and that they have a misguided perception of the situation. Confusion abounds Some of the findings indicate...

There's been way too much obsessing about how artificial intelligence and machine learning will eliminate jobs. For example, 60 Minutes ran a feature on Sunday about AI venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, one of many stories predicting the elimination of jobs and a dystopian takeover of the world (it seems) by machines Lee is a persuasive voice. Having ...

Disruptive innovations are only disruptive for as long as it takes competition to develop and thus create a market. Worse, for the disruptor, the niche it created can spawn other niches. Social networking provides a vivid example First, there were networking sites that could help you find a job or a sales lead. Then there were social sites whose pu...

I've been writing a forecast column every year at least since W was president. Nothing's wrong with that; lots of people do However, I often find that my forecast is more of a wish list than a true prognostication, so this time I'll dispense with the fiction of analytical rigor and just say what I think needs to happen....

Oracle narrowly missed its number last quarter, so it was good to see the company come roaring back with 19 percent non-GAAP EPS growth (i.e., it made a lot of money). More importantly, many analysts have conceded that the company has reached a point in its infrastructure deployment where it can mount a serious challenge to other providers and supply the needed cloud services for its ERP and cloud database businesses.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that leads relatively unskilled individuals to believe their ability is be much higher than is accurate. The individuals might be highly skilled and successful in other areas, but they behave like novices in new areas outside of their skill zones. The bias was observed experimentally for the first time in 1999, by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University.

I was struck by the news that Oracle has filed a suit in federal court over the US$10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract to be awarded to a single vendor. Oracle claims that the single-vendor award is unfair and illegal, a claim it first filed with the GAO, or Government Accountability Office. The suit followed the GAO's denial of Oracle's claim My fi...

You can roughly chart a product's lifecycle based on how it is sold, and this may be having a profound effect on CRM. We generally know that product categories start with disruptions but commoditize over time, and because of this, the economy needs to be refreshed with new disruptions to drive it.

The hoopla over vertical market or industry CRM might be eclipsing a similar move that does the same kind of thing but with less fanfare. In the end, we might be discussing two iterations and just a difference of degree. The proliferation of CRM development platforms by companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and especially Salesforce, is changing how ...

We should start discussing what's beyond CRM. I chose the word "beyond" advisedly. CRM is far, far from dead or even in decline, so "after" would be completely incorrect. However, CRM already has changed so much that it may be time to rethink it. Also, many of the tangential technologies that have turbocharged CRM in the last few years, like socia...

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), on Wednesday told CNBC that AWS customers would be off all Oracle databases by the end of 2019 and running on one of Amazon's database products. This is not the first time the market has heard something like this, but this time could be different. The statement comes on the heels of Amazon spending sig...

My only question about Salesforce's recent revenue announcement is why the company described the vast majority of its nonprofessional services revenues as "subscription and support." Proserv revenues were appropriately small, at US$224 million, while subscription and support was $3.17 billion, or 26 percent more than the same quarter a year earlier. Nice going, by the way...