Articles by Denis

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, is moving to the cloud. You could look at this a...

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries' customers This...

Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recently on the subject of revenue performance management, or RPM, and the combination provided the source of my fascination...

I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day, and while I don't usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I've been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven't thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as a differentiator, so perhaps this is timely The l...

On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies (which it is), but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times As a social learning company, Jambok leverages social med...

One of the more revealing things I heard from Marc Benioff at Cloudforce 2011 in New York last week was his idea about how his company will continue to build out its product line. Marc's never been super secretive about his general direction, though product specifics have always been closely kept. But in our conversation, he reiterated a long-held belief that makes more sense than ever...

There's a great Churchill quote, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all other possibilities," which I think applies to our long sojourn in the valley of social networking. Social networking is important and will be a major part of our future, but I can't help but think that the way we are appro...

The upheaval in the Middle East is roiling the energy markets, and that will affect CRM. Year-over-year, the price of a gallon of regular is up over half a buck nationally, and the average price for said gallon is US$3.18. As gas goes, so does jet fuel. The confluence of rising prices, political unrest and a recovering economy all contribute to the price rise. ...

Sage took a major step in clarifying its position in the market when it hosted an analyst day in Boston last week. The company has been around for a long time and has been one of the higher revenue generators for many years thanks to an assortment of products that span the front and back offices of SMB companies. But the company grew through aggressive acquisition, and that left it with a hodgepodge of products and a weakly defined strategy...

What a week that was. I am still digging out from two snowstorms and dealing with bone-chilling cold, and so are friends across the country, except in the Bay Area, which only makes me envious Perhaps none were as adversely affected as people on the LSD (that's Lake Shore Drive for out-of-towners) in Chicago. I take solace in two forms: one, pitc...

The long recession and the rise of social CRM were not simply coincidental. I believe they happened together. That's not to say that social CRM happened for some cosmic reason; I neither subscribe to the belief that all things happen for a reason nor do I believe I am qualified to hold forth beyond what I've just written. I think social CRM -- ...

Microsoft did some smart things last week when it announced its Dynamics CRM Online service. Most of the headlines will focus on the teaser rate or introductory pricing of only US$34 per seat-month for 12 months. Until June, users of Oracle CRM On-Demand and Salesforce who switch will have an added inducement of up to $200 per user, which everyone acknowledges ought to go to conversion costs. ...

Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas had a coming out party. Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty -- that's 8-oh, my goodness -- tablet PCs to the world. Now, by itself, that's significant, especially for CRM, and something hard to miss even if you're a proverbial blind horse. But let's not stop there; to understand the significance for CRM, we can analyze more information...

We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so even better Most importantly, this was not a one-time...

The cost of business travel is going up and up and up and, oh yeah, Happy New Year Forget all the CRM prognostications you've been reading over the holidays, the only one of significance to your business and to CRM is what you'll be paying to get in front of customers. Last week a former Shell Oil president, John Hofmeister, gave an interview on C...

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure, and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception. On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well. After bottoming in the middle of the summer, the software companies especially seem to be rebounding. Microsoft, O...

"Call rewrite!" That's what they said in the olden days on movie sets when the script needed doctoring. It's also what the technology industry metaphorically does about every 10 years. ...

It's amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word "unique," which means one of a kind. If you add "very" or any other modifier to it, you get mush. ...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vibe when it was announced at Dreamforce. Database....

Though evidence abounds of cloud computing moving from the hype stage to successful adoption and deployment, many enterprises are still not clear on how to adopt cloud and make it part of their enterprise IT strategies. This is in part due to a misperception about what cloud computing is and the number of myths that still exist today about the clo...