Articles by Denis

Modularity is next to motherhood, hot dogs and apple pie in the pantheon of unarguably good things. However, for every rule there are exceptions, and in technology, at least, we may have entered the age of demodularization. For the moment, hot dogs and all the rest are safe, at least at my house For decades we've had it drilled into our heads tha...

What is it about customer service that drove three major CRM companies to make announcements about their service products within days of each other last week? Oracle and Salesforce.com each announced new or completed development of functionality, and RightNow said it bought HiveLive, a social networking solution provider. In fact, every company's announcement had something to do with social media...

There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way To review, Sage announced the 2010 version -- with new ...

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is off the mark, as I think it is, then what is the right approach?...

Last week I was doing some research for a speech, and I remembered something from a weekend stint at a cooking school that I decided to run down. I was trying to make a point about customer experience when it occurred to me that the idea has ancient roots Hospitality law is a body of law that deals with the hotel and restaurant industry, and the b...

Beagle Research did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising, and I present some of our findings here All services are not created equ...

Five years ago, megadeals were all the rage in the business process outsourcing (BPO) world. Global players such as IBM, Accenture, ACS and CSC were racking up billion-dollar multiyear contracts, mainly for accounting, human resource and procurement functions. Now that's changing. "What we can say in BPO is that we have seen a slowdown in deal sig...

Late on a summer morning recently I got a call from my wife saying "On Point," a public radio program, was doing a show on about cloud computing. "Isn't that what you write about?" she said. "You should listen or call in." Well, I tried, and all the lines were jammed, but I was able to make a comment on the Web site. It was a funny show in some ...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts last week that ultra-thin PCs will be the answer to the growing popularity of netbooks. I doubt that, but I can certainly understand Ballmer's interest in backing the ultra-thins, and this obviously has implications for larger issues like cloud computing By now, the sides have been clearly marked out in th...

I am hearing from vendors that their on-premise CRM sales in the early part of this year are pretty good. No one has briefed me ahead of their earnings calls, but the results from late last year and Q1 seem to be pretty good I should probably wait until the numbers for the last quarter come out from the vendors, but I've seen enough to call an obv...

What a summer for remembrances. Forty years ago, a couple of people landed on the moon, and a half-million of them landed on Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York for the Woodstock festival. [*correction] That might sound like ancient history, but of course without the space program, who knows where the technology industry would be today. The pe...

My ride from San Francisco Airport to Redwood Shores, Calif., tells the story of my entire trip to the West Coast last week. Southbound on Route 101, traffic was lighter than I was accustomed to in my more than 10 years of visiting the area. Northbound, there was a five-mile backup, which caused me to miss a meeting later on in the city. ...

This story was originally published on April 17, 2009, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series You search, you find, you click "buy." Your e-commerce quest is nearly complete. You get to that checkout screen, and you think it's all good. Then the shipping charges get tacked onto your total, and you're left thinking that U...

This story was originally published on Dec. 4, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. When it comes to setting up your Web presence, entrepreneurs are surprisingly lax. Depending on who you talk to, about half of small businesses do not have a Web site. Most of those will tell you that it's just too complicated, ...

Kudos to all those who participated in, organized or even attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in drizzly Boston last week. There is a lot to write about The big ideas that I took away include disruption and evolution, ROI and a need to sharpen our focus. Here are a few thoughts on a very good show....

Events taking place on the streets of Tehran may have an important effect on how social networking rolls out across the rest of the world, and that includes the CRM world. Last week, the media began carrying stories about a "cyber revolution" that may be happening in the Islamic Republic, but those stories fail to account for the whole story -- the yin and yang of social media...

What do these things have in common? Maybe nothing other than that the movie has a sequel and the two-dot-oh suffix is a sequel. Also, the start of blockbuster movie sequel season overlaps with trade shows like Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Sales 2.0 was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago, Enterprise 2.0 is coming next week, and I can't wait....

Business schools have been discussing General Motor's loss of market shar for decades already, and the added denouement of the company's bankruptcy filing will no doubt drive many academic papers for decades to come The roots of GM's fall from grace are numerous, and it would be incorrect to attribute the fall to any single factor. Like Rome's fal...

Clara Shih is a friend I met through Salesforce.com. She recently published The Facebook Era, which looks at the relationship of social networking to front office computing. She is really busy these days promoting the book, and she recently left Salesforce to pursue new ideas in social networking and to form a company dedicated to the task. Shi...

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level. I was there and got a sense of change happening. It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the imprint she is making on the company. Last year, Swenson had been with the company for only a matter of weeks and as CEO could only talk about the future. With a year behind her some results are apparent, but the expectation is that there is a lot of work ahead. ...