Articles by Denis

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives recently told Seeking Alpha that the influx of AI into the software industry was reminiscent of the 1990s, calling it a 1995 moment. As an investor, Ives seemed to be looking at the eruption in share values of almost any software company getting involved with AI Closer to home, major CRM vendors like Salesforce a...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on Tuesday held a clinic on Trusted AI and its impact on Salesforce CRM The idea of trust has been part and parcel of Salesforce's approach for many years, and Benioff's presentation added a new layer that was only sketched out previously. While I am still leery of using "trusted" as a descriptor, there is logic in the e...

Salesforce last week in Chicago announced its AI Cloud during Connections, its marketing conference. AI Cloud incorporates many aspects of ChatGPT, and the moniker is all over the offerings as in Einstein GPT or, more formally, Einstein GPT Trust Layer The nice thing about the Trust Layer, according to the company, is that it makes AI Cloud open an...

Salesforce's Tableau held its user conference in Las Vegas this week, where it made several announcements designed to improve performance and usability. It also announced a ChatGPT version, Tableau GPT, and Tableau Pulse, analytics personalized to user needs I saw the demos and heard the keynotes from my perch near Boston, and I've decided to let o...

Oracle has waxed and waned over the years about the benefits accrued using an integrated suite of applications instead of opening up to a slew of best-of-breed apps. They're back now, peddling the idea of a unified suite in marketing. Recently, EVP Rob Tarkoff went so far as to say that "best of breed has jumped the shark." I've been skeptical of s...

I've been searching for an explanation of what's going on out there in economics, technology, and business for a while -- heck, all of my professional life Sometimes, like roughly the time between the last banking fiasco and the epidemic, there's not much to report. It's status quo, and everything seems to move along....

Before the AI revolution, CRM had a well-defined, if not often discussed, role that tied it to the product commoditization cycle For instance, when a category is new, businesses employ many people to sell and service the new, new thing. The high labor component makes new products relatively expensive compared to other, older solutions. Yet customer...

Cloud computing, and especially Salesforce's brand of it, has changed the business world significantly, and that's undisputable to the point of being cliché. However, Benioff and company are not done yet; they may be going through some of the same turbulence we've seen over the years as activist investors take adversarial positions with the company's stock -- but the result will likely be different...

Two things occurred to me while writing about Salesforce's current dust-up with activist investors. First, in the last piece, I noted that activist investors are all over the place, and they take interest in companies and whole sectors all the time when they see an opportunity to make a buck. Nothing unusual there But interestingly and second, ther...

This could end badly -- or not Activist investors Elliott Management Corp., Inclusive Capital, and Starboard Value LP have all taken significant positions in Salesforce, and the scuttlebutt is that they want board seats. Salesforce is a target of those companies because they believe they can make the company more profitable and make themselves sign...

Almost every major tech company is experiencing a round of layoffs, even though most are making good profits. Many people have never seen vast layoffs like this, so the honest question is, why is this happening? Is it fashion, fatigue, or something more secular to blame? You can't rule out fashion in a monkey-see, monkey-do way Since there's reason...

As an analyst, I am a generalist -- you almost must be unless you're Paul Greenberg, who captures and manages a hellacious amount of data about nearly every company in the space. Hat's off to my buddy Paul! I take a different approach, trying to understand and define industry needs first and evaluating how various vendors meet them. There's some fl...

The signs and symptoms of the tech world's decline in 2022 abound. "Peak Tech," suggests writer Brian Merchant in an article from The Atlantic titled "The End of the Silicon Valley Myth." His blunt pronouncement: "The companies that define our digital lives have hit a wall." If true, it's a serious indictment and raises the critical question: What's next?...

Predicting the future is a fool's errand, even, or maybe especially, in CRM, yet we're all over it like a cheap suit this time of year I was recently part of a series of panels on CRM Playaz, a streaming show from my friends Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary. The show consisted of a panel of CRM industry executives, another panel of analysts, and a th...

The fail-fast idea is the iterative prototyping of our time, though I find the older term preferable. Implicit in the failure idea is that you succeed now and then, and it's only to get to the successes that we seek fast failure. If it ain't gonna work, let's be done with it and try something else This brute force approach feels familiar because it...

The U.S. Department of Defense last week announced a $9 billion contract to get the major tech companies to provide its next-generation cloud computing infrastructure and application platform. I think My hesitation comes from reading the DoD announcement, which appears to award a "hybrid (firm-fixed-price and time-and-materials, indefinite-delivery...

Salesforce had its quarterly earnings call the other day. No spoiler, they made a lot of money, grew significantly, and generally had fun doing it. However, the real news from the call, for me, was that Bret Taylor is stepping down from the number 1-A position of Co-CEO and Co-Chair to return to his roots in entrepreneurship Taylor's fingerprints a...

CRM is, in many ways, the story of maturing markets. Our technology was innovated to help with the big jobs of finding customers for new and sometimes hard-to-understand products, servicing those customers, and finding ways to renew their enthusiasm with new versions CRM did a lot of other things too. For the first time, CRM made it easy first to c...

I came away from CloudWorld (metaphorically, I was not on site) with a distinct feeling of meh. There were loads of announcements and new technologies that would fill most customers' shopping carts, but it was hardly overwhelming for me as a CRM analyst That's not a bad thing, believe it or not....

How do they do this? That's all I want to know I started my career in database, on minicomputers. The relational database wasn't exactly fast, but it beat the pants off flat file systems that needed to be periodically dumped to tape and reloaded to…well, don't ask....