Articles by Denis

On an otherwise slow news week, I spotted a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia. The article was on Business Insider, and I found it interesting ...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." For the record, I am an ERP dilatant -- I know about it but don't follow it with the same passion that I follow CRM. And as far as SAP is concerned, I have rarely met a bunch of smarter business people who ar...

If you've been in this business any length of time, you've become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what's next? We've had our share of net new ideas over t...

A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog just posted Tuesday. Sadovy reminded me of the im...

At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss? It was a fine idea. Customers came to San Franci...

Predixion Software has introduced Predixion Insight 2.0, the latest version of its collaborative predictive analytics solution. The new release includes enterprise collaboration features, interactive visualizations and automated workflow capabilities, as well as an on-premises version of its predictive analytics solution. With Predixion Insight 2....

I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing with it effectively. They've been content to watch and wait, hoping that the movement will exhaust itself. That's a good strategy for the last millennium, and the movement may wear out if only because as winter approaches it gets harder to remain committed to living on the street. But I wouldn't bet on it...

What struck me most last week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- beyond Oracle OpenWorld -- came out of meetings I had with CEOs of software companies situated south of Oracle on Route 101. The companies are all SaaS (Software as a Service)-based, and I promised not to spill the beans, so there will be no names -- yet Admittedly, my survey is ...

Half of U.S. companies plan to invest more on IT resources in 2012 than in 2011, according to Nucleus Research. In fact, 10 percent of the companies surveyed were planning an increase of 10 percent or greater; only one out of 10 planned to decrease spending next year. "Our survey shows that companies view technology investments as a means to drive...

Oracle is a big company, and that point gets driven home when you start to go in-depth on their products. At a show like OpenWorld, which is dedicated more or less to touching on every aspect of the business, you can quickly get out of your depth Since the opening keynote on Sunday, the talk has been mainly around things that I know about but don'...

Last week's doings at HP exposed a lot that few of us ever think about. The basic story is that board member Meg Whitman replaced recently minted CEO Leo Apotheker. The company's stock price has been floundering for a long time, and many people on and off the board had little confidence in the job Apotheker was doing. But that's the CliffsNotes version...

Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management (WFM) solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Teleopti's skills-based contact center agent forecasting and scheduling.

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was when Victoria's Secret decided to do an online fashion show. ...

The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That's not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last 10 years that rival this year's Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference, that was also major. But a lot has happened since the last time Siebel held an independent user event not associated with Oracle -- that was in 2005 and much has happened in the intervening six years...

At the biggest Salesforce.com event to date, Dreamforce '11, vendors had ample opportunities to strut their stuff. In fact, more than 46,000 people -- many of them very socially engaged -- registered this year. "In less than a decade, Dreamforce has become the largest conference in the enterprise software industry," Fergus Griffin, vice president ...

It's worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce -- the products announced -- as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist, and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters Many people might look at the news coming out of San Francisco and try to calculate the ROI on one or a...

UPDATE: 2:21 PM PT, 9/2/11: They call it a Q&A session, but when Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff takes questions, he draws the kind of crowd in front of which you often see politicians performing. The group has gotten too big for me to know everyone or even most people -- especially since it includes press, financial analysts and industry analysts. ...

There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce. For some reason, I don't understand why Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year, which is fortunate for two reasons: Hurricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the East Coast over the weekend, and given the number of users coming from the east, it was fortunate. Many people were able to reschedule flights, though some inevitably missed being at Dreamforce this year...

Salesforce.com has been front and center the past couple of weeks, revving up for its Dreamforce '11 cloud computing industry event, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is expected to draw more than 40,000 registered attendees and showcase 1,000 solutions from 300 Salesforce.com cloud computing partners.

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. This is not new or unique to Salesforce; every vendor does this, a...