Articles by Denis

One of the big stories of next year might be decentralization. It's below the radar right now, which is why I think it has potential. Decentralization is what it sounds like: pushing centralized processes and decision-making to the periphery, where it is believed people can be more effective at dealing with whatever is on tap Western democratic cap...

Dreamforce is a bit like a holiday feast in that there are usually leftovers to savor. One of the stories that didn't get enough attention at last month's event was Salesforce's path to becoming a carbon-neutral company. Time to savor it Salesforce has made a monumental effort to switch to green electricity generation and ensure that its buildings ...

Configure, Price, Quote systems have a name problem. When they debuted, their basic functions gave a name to the category that was self-explanatory, and it fit well. As with any good idea in technology, however, frequent use brought with it demand for more functionality that quickly outstripped the technology's charter -- a happy problem. Today's ...

Show season changes the CRM market; it always does. One day you're in the vanilla application software space, and a week later you understand the need to incorporate social media or analytics or machine learning, or you see a need for enhanced integration and development through platform services. It goes on. Today, in the wake of Oracle, Salesfor...

Dreamforce 2017 is in full swing this week in San Francisco, which means that Salesforce is changing, shedding a skin to reveal a new and improved creature. This time, rather than announcing a new cloud or a mountain of technology, the company seems focused on improving what it has and delivering a tighter and more powerful solution set for a future that's just emerging. I see a pivot in all this...

A recent New York Times story about a conference held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, chilled me to the bone. The headline supplies all the reasons: "Saudi Arabia's Grand Plan to Move Beyond Oil: Big Goals, Bigger Hurdles." At first glance, this doesn't ring any CRM bells, but maybe it should. Why would any business or business-state contemplate moving o...

There will be little New Year's Eve celebrating but perhaps a lot of morning-after hangovers for U.S. businesses that haven't begun preparing for ASC 606, the Financial Accounting Standards Board's new rules about revenue recognition. They are set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2018. The news is much the same for Europe, though there the rule's name is "IFRS 15."

Salesforce is a large and well-disciplined development company. It's pretty good at marketing too. It continues to innovate in all product areas, from core platform to applications, and the one criticism I'd make is that it's information overload at times. Reminds me of Oracle Lately Salesforce has made a big deal of adding its AI product, Einstein...

If you need an example of digital disruption, you can't do better than the retail banking industry. A byzantine collection of rules and regulations, plus the overhang of many legacy systems, has conspired to prevent banks from becoming more involved with their customers Even innovations like the ATM, which entered the scene several decades ago, onl...

I spent last week at Oracle's customer event, OpenWorld 2017, in San Francisco. When I wasn't drinking from an information fire hose, it was alternately fascinating and exhausting. There were major announcements in database, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and other stuff I'm associated with only tangentially. For instance, my ...

Digital Hub is not a new idea. It's been percolating for a few years, and its roots can be traced to Dublin, Ireland, where in a cluster of eight buildings, there exists what might be the original hub. In Dublin, it's made up of 97 companies employing 725 people, and it was given a jumpstart by the government in 2003. Elsewhere, we might be more attuned to the idea of a tech incubator...

When Salesforce unveiled sales forecasting with its artificial intelligence tool, Einstein, my immediate reaction was that it should have tried something easier -- like solving global warming. Really, a sales forecast that bears some resemblance to reality has been a grail quest for all of us for many years, and Salesforce is not the first software company to throw its hat in the ring...

Oracle showed some very good numbers in its latest earnings announcement. As it begins its second year of aggressive cloud promotion, the company overall is showing significant year-over-year improvements, thanks to its turn to cloud infrastructure, applications and platforms. Yet when read right, the numbers announce the end of the beginning of the end as much as they announce the end of the beginning...

Salesforce earlier this year introduced its Einstein Vision capability, an idea with a lot of promise but not a great deal of precedent. Who had applications that could see, and how would this be used? For decades, we've been content with scanning documents and analyzing them with optical character recognition tools, or we've used bar codes and QR ...

Oracle will announce its Q1 revenue and profit numbers after the markets close on Wednesday. There's more than a little excitement about what might be revealed, specifically if the company can continue its rise, thanks to its cloud products. The anticipated answer is yes, for a number of reasons, but there's also potential for a surprise. First the surprise...

Many businesses still don't use configure, price, quote software in their routine sales processes. Maybe they don't need it, but for businesses that still cling to spreadsheet-based approaches to track things like price lists and product catalogs, chances are good that they're dealing with more overhead than they need to. Worse, they're wasting time and therefore money.

Salesforce announced the partial attainment of one of its long-range goals in its second-quarter earnings announcement last week: It eclipsed its goal of a US$10 billion run rate. This will be followed by similar announcements over the next year (first $10 billion year, etc.), and why not? The company should celebrate Second quarter revenue hit $2....

As an industry, CRM continues to grow and shower benefits on its users. It's hard to imagine that some businesses still don't use some form of CRM, but the data presented in a new infographic from Algoworks suggests that businesses are still buying their first CRM solutions or changing vendors. It's a compilation of data from all over, with some credible inputs from Gartner and others, so it's worth taking a look...

The further we go in the CRM adventure, the less our efforts seem to be about technology. That's because we're reaching a theoretical limit, or asymptote, on what technology can do in the vendor-customer relationship. Think of an asymptote as the ceiling that a graph never reaches as it curls over to the horizontal. Increasingly, we're encounterin...

CPQ -- that is, configure, price, quote -- is one of the most transitional apps, because it spans front and back offices, and because its very existence has changed these functions. Another app in this category is sales compensation management. Both of their stories are about front-office processes needing back-office data. Once the data is made available, the process evolves to be far more useful to the business...