Articles by Denis

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere (and I am tempted to write that word without the 'K') started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in I write a l...

This is the fifth in an ongoing series on buiding a Web site for your small business. Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. Part 2 offers basic site design guidelines. Part 3 tackles some advanced design issues.Part 4 examines social media tools for building traffic Many small-business operators have been especially hard-hit wh...

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowing the same field, but you might notice the com...

Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. Part 2 offers basic site design guidelines. Part 3 tackles some advanced design issues When it comes to Web 2.0 tools and your business Web site, there's a time and a place for everything. Web master wannabes with businesses to run often go overboard with the plethora of social networking t...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in that it is a leapfrog event. The service and support...

I have been writing about communities for many years, and it seems like a particularly good topic for the interesting times we live in, to borrow a Chinese phrase. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this is a perfect time to engage in community building, but there is a lot of ambiguity built into that statement, so today I will attempt to clarify ...

Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. Part 2 offers basic site design guidelines Anyone who's tried designing a Web site or working with a designer knows that the job inevitably turns out bigger and more complicated than expected. Some have created a graphically rich thing of beauty only to discover that half the users visiting...

Happy New Year! Let's be counterintuitive for a moment, shall we? We're in a recession and we all know it. Traditionally (and sadly) in an economic downturn, when companies seek to lower their expenses, they cut their marketing budgets -- and why not? Marketing costs money, and if you believe your marketing messages will fall on deaf ears in a s...

Growth of the mobile broadband market happens along two major dimensions: subscribers (adoption rate) and traffic (use rate). Specific growth drivers for both of these categories vary by geographic region, but in general, drivers can be divided into three major categories that are applicable to all the regions: Evolution of useful mobile applicatio...

This story was originally published on Sept. 26, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series When it comes to security software, who really knows what lurks in the minds of today's users? It appears that most people seem to choose their security products based on a lot of other factors beyond their ability to protect th...

This story was originally published on Sept. 25, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series After more than a decade in the software privacy and antipiracy space, Keith Beeman, general manager, Worldwide Anti-Piracy, Small and Midmarket, Solutions & Partners for Microsoft, says he has been able to gain a first-hand vie...

This story was originally published on Sept. 25, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series After more than a decade in the software privacy and antipiracy space, Keith Beeman, general manager, Worldwide Anti-Piracy, Small and Midmarket, Solutions & Partners for Microsoft, says he has been able to gain a first-hand vie...

This story was originally published on Sept. 25, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series After more than a decade in the software privacy and antipiracy space, Keith Beeman, general manager, Worldwide Anti-Piracy, Small and Midmarket, Solutions & Partners for Microsoft, says he has been able to gain a first-hand vie...

What a great time to be thinking about the future. Seriously This is my last column of the year, and traditionally I try to forecast some movements in the market for the year ahead. This year it takes a special kind of fortitude to even read a piece like this, let alone write it, but if you think about it, this really ought to be a good time for ...

This is the second installment in a multi-part series on building a Web site for your small business. Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. This article offers site design guidelines With all the free online Web building and design tools, a lot of time-strapped business owners might think that with a few strategic drags and dr...

I don't know about you, but I will be happy to write "The End" on the chapter we call 2008. Normally, at the end of a year I look back at some of my predictions from a year earlier and look for some indication that I was on track at least some of the time. This year is different. Who cares, really -- the big story in the economy was on no one's radar that I know of...

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a white paper that resonated around the industry like a three-point shot clanging off the front of the rim as time expired. A "brick," in the vernacular of basketball; nonetheless, I view it as some of my finest work. The paper, "The New Garage," takes as its premise that cloud computing -- not simply on-demand or S...

This is the first installment in a multi-part series on building a Web site for your small business 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, time-consuming and exp...

We can all read the news. Credit is frozen, or nearly so, and the federal government is laboring mightily to get credit flowing again. Unfortunately, here in the U.S. as well as in other places, like the UK, banks have become averse to doing business. The news reports I read say that after being too lax, many banks are being too strict in their lending policies and are sitting on the cash that governments have given them to lend. What can CRM do here?...

I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. A quick glance a couple of weeks ago told me that the company had added a new color ...