Articles by Denis

During the same week it was sued by irate investors over progress moving its customer base to the cloud, Oracle protested a procurement process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, according to The Washington Post. The lawsuit will take a long time to resolve, and it's difficult to see how the plaintiffs can prove their case -...

A lot of people might have thought Oracle's announcement of the autonomous database at last year's OpenWorld and its subsequent release earlier this year were the whole story, but there's a lot more, and Tuesday's webcast featuring Larry Ellison was proof Ellison must find his CTO role -- since he handed the CEO reins to Safra Catz and Mark Hurd --...

There are many interpretations of Salesforce's elevation of Keith Block to serve as co-CEO with Marc Benioff, a decision announced Tuesday Block has been the company's vice chairman and president for several years, and the elevation simply could be a recognition of the obvious -- he's been doing the job without the title for a while....

I have been writing a lot about social media becoming a utility -- in my last piece, for example -- and one friend summed up his objections very well: "Nicely written and well argued, Denis. However, the question that popped up is, will consumers be willing to pay for social media? Might charging for it cause consumers to flee?" Here are some possi...

The CRM industry spent the better part of a decade building up the social aspect of CRM. Back in about 2004, I wrote a paper suggesting that capturing large quantities of customer data, analyzing it, and feeding the results to social media should be a big part of CRM's future. That was before Twitter and Facebook were in the picture, and all we really had to point to when discussing social media were LinkedIn and Plaxo...

A confusing dynamic has emerged in the software industry caused by the inexorable shift to the cloud. Even before you can get into the analysis, though, you need to identify which cloud(s) you're thinking about -- e.g., infrastructure, apps, platform Also, once you've done that, you need to decide if you're partial to technology or financial analys...

The Internet has a long and storied history of democratizing information and influencing social change. It has flattened hierarchies and made information accessible to many more people -- though, ironically, it also has sometimes assaulted democracy in the process. Just think about how philanthropy has been changing at the instigation of Salesforce, one of the Internet's poster kids...

Salesforce on Monday announced a definitive agreement to acquire the marketing analytics company Datorama The acquisition will give Marketing Cloud a power boost by expanding data integration and intelligence, according to Salesforce....

So far, the looming trade war is limited to actions and reactions related to durable things that trade throughout the global economy -- cars, steel and aluminum, for instance. Will that remain the battleground? Or should we expect greater contentiousness around services -- specifically, Software as a Service, and CRM in particular? Retaliation for ...

The close of the second quarter ends the first wave of vendor customer events. Still to come this fall are Salesforce Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld -- and others -- but mercifully, we have the summer to digest all the information absorbed this spring and re-sync with our native time zones Following are some things I learned during show season, bu...

Significant Q4 wins and earnings numbers reflect the strength of Oracle's resurgence as a cloud company. At its earnings call earlier this week, CEO Mark Hurd mentioned some big names -- including Johnson & Johnson, the Cleveland Clinic, Baylor University and AT&T -- that made significant commitments to Oracle in the quarter. It's no wonder then t...

Although Oracle was one of the last major enterprise software vendors to initiate a move to the cloud, it has embraced the idea of creative destruction in breathtaking ways. With BYOL -- Bring Your Own License -- the company has inspired a movement of its traditional software customers to its infrastructure cloud. With the recently announced Soar ...

A good way to understand what Salesforce articulated at Connections 2018 is to recall the direction it set a few years ago, when CEO Marc Benioff said the company would develop most apps for the small screen first. Translated, that was a concession that handheld devices -- phones and tablets -- would become the primary devices we'd all use in business. Lots of software vendors took the same position, though arguably few did it as fast...

Zuora recently held its annual Subscribed user conference in San Francisco. In general, it was a good first outing since the company's IPO, coming off some impressive first-quarter results. Year-over-year subscription revenues grew 39 percent and total revenue grew an amazing 60 percent, for example As good as its present situation is, now that Zuo...

Decades after computers were supposed to end paper-based business, we're still at it, using documents to send and receive information and act as proxies in business processes. It's hard to say if paper consumption slowed thanks to digitization, because good historical use statistics are hard to find. However, it doesn't really matter, because business is drowning in paper -- and, more importantly, the expenses associated with it...

"Caught short by Salesforce, SAP targets 'front office' market" is more revealing than SAP might like, but the headline on Reuters' story is appropriate to the announcements coming out of SAP's annual customer confab in Orlando, Florida. It describes SAP's new attempt to consolidate a group of about a dozen front office apps into a fully integrated customer relationship management suite -- next year...

Oracle has been on a security campaign ever since Larry Ellison openly began discussing the new "autonomous database" -- so called because it can manage itself, including self-patching and upgrading, without human effort. The hands-off database can eliminate human labor to keep it tuned and running, according to Oracle, greatly reducing the time b...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described Facebook as the "new cigarettes" in a recent appearance on the television show CBS This Morning and called for the U.S. to adopt a national privacy law like the GDPR, which just went into effect in Europe. "Maybe this is a time where the government has to step in and regulate not just that product but really o...

It was once common knowledge that Apttus was the next big acquisition target on Salesforce's radar, until Salesforce decided to acquire another CPQ (configure, price, quote) vendor to augment its Sales Cloud. In the two-ish years since, Apttus has nicely pivoted, diversifying its partner base and justifying its existence with a new strategy and nomenclature around what it calls the "middle office." I was present at Accelerate, the company's annual user conference, last week in San Francisco...

Oracle -- or could we say "Autoracle"? -- has introduced more autonomous products, generally in keeping with what I see as a build-out of an information utility. The products, announced last week, include Autonomous Analytics, Autonomous Integrations, Autonomous Builder code generation and free premium service. Let's take a look....