Articles by Denis

A new year! Blank screen! OK, let's talk! I think sustainability will be a big theme for me from this year onward. If your idea of sustainability is mostly about rain forest preservation and similar topics, I hope you will read on and think new....

This story was originally published on Oct. 19, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. You might say that supply chain management has entered the philosophical realm. SCM investment has flatlined to a large extent, and the market's focus has changed as supply chain headaches become more complex and cut a broader ...

Am I kidding me? Forecasting the year ahead? Sheesh! One of the reasons the task I set for myself is so daunting this year is that I believe we are in a massive transition state that affects the whole economy, CRM included. I think Tom Friedman got it right in version 2.0 of his Hot, Flat and Crowded, to wit: The root causes of the economic melt...

Every year-end I write two columns. One looks back on the prior year's forecast; the other looks ahead. This is the first of the two, and it's time to compare my projections for the year with what actually happened Last year I took an optimistic approach by saying that it was a great time for innovation. You might recall there was plenty to worr...

Breaking development news from iPhone or BlackBerry rarely goes unnoticed. The recent announcement of new developer-friendly tools for the BlackBerry platform at the RIM Developer Conference was no exception, generating interest and debate over what it all means in the battle of the smartphones. While the move could be considered a branding ploy t...

Finally, Paul Greenberg's new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light hit the streets last week, and with it, my description of him as our Walt Whitman remains intact. To promote the continuing franchise, the fourth edition's cover has the same design as the third edition but with a different color scheme. But that's about the only similarity between editions; everything between the covers of edition four is new...

This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84 percent) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all have more women visiting them. ...

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." What he meant was that trends become what we think the underlying idea is -...

I was re-reading Eric von Hippel's excellent book Democratizing Innovation and found something in it that might help explain the popularity of cloud computing and Platform as a Service (PaaS). I am on the way to Dreamforce and have little visibility into what Salesforce.com might announce in the next day or two, but no doubt there will be a lot about the cloud, so this might be a good opportunity to make my point. Regardless, I will have more to say later...

Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,000 people, but despite that number of people, t...

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. There are still 6,600 mainframes in operation in the U.S., according to Tma...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least Contact center managers have a never-ending desire to streamline operations to keep spending in check. If they're not focusing on finding new outsourcing options for cutting fro...

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages The Black Swan is about uncertainty in the real world, and the subtitle explains it all: "The...

Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park (for sticklers, "Pikes" really should be "Pike's," but the official U.S. naming convention eliminates the apostrophe). The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good idea; it's a nice place...

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it, and I don't want to leave anything out but I will try to be brief. First off, how w...

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points at the Churchill Club. Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it, and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time. For example, Salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service, and many other companies do too. ...

In the continuing discussion of cloud computing, Salesforce.com occupies a unique place. While most cloud vendors have kept to one component of cloud computing, Salesforce has inserted itself into all areas, and the company is using its flagship CRM applications as its first case example Most people would agree that cloud computing is constructed ...

As luck would have it, I knew nothing about Larry Ellison's rant at the Churchill Club on Sept. 21 about cloud computing when I wrote last week's piece on cloud computing. I saw it on YouTube. You have to admit that Larry is a heck of a showman, and the video is fun to watch. But whenever someone in that kind of situation starts to nit pick ove...

I have an ongoing conversation with an industry executive about the nature of on-demand, SaaS and cloud computing. The central question is, what is it exactly? Our conversation is always thought provoking, and I come away from it with at least some additional perspective. Sometimes I think the discussion is incredibly philosophical, like the question about a tree falling in the forest -- does it make a sound if no one is there to witness it?...

Some think of it as just an offshoot of CRM. Others view PRM, or partner relationship management, as interchangeable with sales force automation. The reality is PRM is coming of age in its own right, as manufacturers and technology companies struggle to manage their highly complex -- and constantly shifting -- channel partnerships. "Anytime there ...