Articles by Denis

Sage's Tuesday announcement of its agreement to buy Intacct prompts a multilayered look at the evolution of the cloud enterprise resource planning space. Both companies are partners with Salesforce and have products based on the Salesforce platform. Each is a member of the AppExchange, and both are situated in the broad cloud ERP space, which has been receiving a lot of attention lately as the market seems to be moving en masse, albeit glacially, to the cloud...

It's hard to believe that the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX could have such reactionary views about artificial intelligence. Elon Musk last weekend had some very un-Musk-like things to say about AI when he addressed the U.S. National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. "AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don't think people fully appreciate that," Musk said. He even suggested that government ought to regulate the nascent industry -- but it's hard to regulate that which isn't yet formed. It's reminiscent of what happened when the George W. Bush administration decided to restrict stem cell research. The regulation didn't work because the research simply moved to more friendly jurisdictions.

People concerned about automation killing jobs might look at Helpshift's strategy and similar automation approaches. By enabling businesses to build help or support into mobile apps, these new models are re-inventing support to get the job done. Sure, they provide automated support in lieu of conventional agents, but they do so at a level where it...

So much is happening as we approach the end of Q2 -- our industry's busiest quarter, at least by some measures. I'm flying around seeing things but not always able to comment from a middle seat on a red-eye. So this piece is an attempt to catch up and set some markers for the traditionally slower summer I've been searching for a word to describe a ...

FinancialForce held its first big time user conference in Las Vegas last week, headlined by new CEO Tod Nielsen. The company seems to be telling us that it is adjusting course in an effort to create a new category aligned with enterprise resource planning, but very much for this century The key concept is services, which must be explained. We've gr...

For several years now, Salesforce has built distinct product lines that all work off the same platform and can integrate in interesting ways. There are product lines for the enterprise, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), business-to-business (B2B) firms and business-to-consumer (B2C) operations -- and probably some others that I haven't considered. For instance, the AppExchange contains a wealth of apps for very specialized types of front-office business, as well as some back-office apps, like accounting...

While sitting in the audience at Zuora's Subscribed event for customers and partners in San Francisco this week, I couldn't help contemplate the meaning and progress of what was once a set of words that didn't roll off the tongue. I am talking about the "subscription economy" -- and it's really something The data coming in from a variety of sources...

A lot happens in a decade. Bill Gates once said that we overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10. 2017 is a particularly good time to stop paddling and look back at what's been going on in the last decade. While we will all have our favorite memories, there's one in CRM that stands out more than others for me...

I don't know why more subscription vendors don't do this. Subscription companies collect mountains of data from their customers, and analyzing the aggregations can deliver profound insights virtually for free. Yet too often subscribers are reluctant to let their data be stripped of identifying characteristics and used for research. Too bad, because there's gold in that big data...

Mobile technology has delivered a lot of useful functionality that enables vendors and their customers to be on the same page more frequently. However, the screen size has an inherent drawback: It shows a very narrow slice of a reality -- typically one idea at a time. The problem is especially acute in the key areas of sales and service A mobile "h...

E-commerce brings together several themes that relate to our current fascination with artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), bots, mobile technology and the like. It's actually more than that, because it represents an underserved part of CRM. Until fairly recently, there were few tools that retailers could use to reach online customers fo...

CFOs have a new 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner, as if they needed another one. Actually, the really lucky ones who oversee operations in Europe and the U.S. will have two. ASC 606 and IFRS 15 are new accounting rules that describe in great detail how subscription vendors should recognize revenue beginning in December 2018, and we should all care about them...

Salesforce this week announced significant enhancements to its AppExchange Partner Program, including a US$100 million Salesforce Platform Fund to encourage developers of AI-driven solutions, as well as changes to its partner business model. Salesforce arguably was the first kid on the block with a partner program of this kind in which buyers coul...

It gives some measure of the importance we give to AI that I went to two conferences last week and sat through two panel sessions on the subject. At CRM Evolution, I was part of the discussion in a breakfast session Paul Greenberg organizes each year. Then I flew to Las Vegas for the Oracle CX show. There executives involved in the adaptive intelligent applications product line tried to define the basics in a session for analysts and reporters...

A few years ago, when Oracle was busy buying companies to fill out its front-office cloud offering, RightNow Technologies developed a "day in the life" video that has stuck with me. It was shown at RightNow's last user meeting as an independent company. In fact, at the conference where it debuted, Oracle announced its acquisition of RightNow The vi...

They say it can take a product idea 10 years to go from concept to mass-market appeal but that might be only an optimist's viewpoint. Some of the best ideas in CRM right now have been marinating for at least that long -- and some for much longer. Two great examples are analytics and CPQ, which companies like Oracle, Salesforce and others have embraced with passion. Interestingly, each technology has traversed a path that needed other technologies to become fully mature...

Watching Oracle's cloud strategy roll out has been interesting, to say the least, and it's given me renewed respect for its approach to the market. As a company that has been public for a long stretch of time, Oracle has displayed all the warmth of an anaconda. (I have friends there, and they are not anacondas, but I hope they know what I mean.) O...

It's mud season here in New England -- that time of year when everything merges into an amorphous mess. The gray sky merges with a gray landscape made into slop by continual rains and dirty gray melting snow. It's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. Eventually the sun comes out and dries everything, the sky becomes distinct from the horizon, plants bloom from the firming ground, and order is restored. What better time for Amazon and Salesforce to announce another partnership?...

We've seen a parade of technologies coming into the front office since 2000, including browser-based cloud computing, social media, mobile technology, workflow, journey mapping, and big data and analytics. It's typical that at first there's only a tenuous relationship between the technology and CRM's original mission, but over a short time innovators adopt and commercialize the innovation -- often by rethinking or inventing from whole cloth business processes that leverage the technology's attributes.

There's a big difference between B2C and B2B analytics that no vendors seem to be addressing, and it involves the consumption model. I recently spoke with K.V. Rao, founder and chief strategy officer of Aviso, an analytics company focused on sales, and his unabashed opinion is that "if you're trying to expose insights and make things consumable, you have to address workflow." ...