Articles by Denis

It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in some quarters where you might not expect innovation or creativity...

A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By process of elimination hybrid won out simply because we could not conclude that the show was anything else.

I have been operating in tired mode continuously since the conventions, and by the time you read this, I may have gotten some serious sleep, though I doubt it because this is Dreamforce week after all. There have been too many things competing for my attention after dinner each evening, and none of them resembles a good book or a client. In no particular order, the list includes the Red Sox, Patriots, Republicans and Democrats. ...

You can't say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrate Facebook and Salesforce.com. Amazingly, despite...

Last week NetSuite held a user group meeting in Boston for OpenAir, a company that they had bought earlier this year. OpenAir, if you don't know, provides an application for managing professional services engagements. When integrated with NetSuite's front and back office applications, the combination provides a lot of functionality for a professional services group. I was invited to attend CEO Zach Nelson's keynote in the afternoon, but I found out later that there was another speech that I would have enjoyed as well...

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme -- Mark Twain...

The market to distribute premium video content (mainly TV episodes and feature-length movies) is currently going through one of its most dynamic periods, as experimentation with business models, delivery mechanisms and consumer tastes is in full swing. In the age of online entertainment, consumers get virtually unlimited choice of content and the ...

Not that it's a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. After Oracle OpenWorld, I made the observation that Siebel appeared to be returning to its old prominence. The introduction of new products based on Web 2.0 ideas, the continued strength in all glo...

I have to admit that it's hard to concentrate on business with so many issues and crises swirling around lately. As if the presidential election was not enough, the financial meltdown is threatening an economic meltdown, and I am forever asking myself what this all might mean to CRM The political pros are saying that this is a seminal year in the ...

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn't introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature that helps you to do your job. You might say that such gatherings are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. ...

While enterprises may be on top of their security practices for the most part, data leakage as a result of end user misuse and abuse is something that might very well be flying under the radar According to a newly released global study by Cisco, "The Challenge of Data Leakage for Business and Employees Around the World," employees are taking numero...

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 their computers from the malicious forces at work Whatever the label on the box or the icon on the screen, it also appears t...

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 view of software piracy issues on a global scale Piracy is a pervasive issue that can often catch enterprise customers by sur...

The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. I will leave it to you to search for them and to download their full report. What was intere...

"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surprised by the number of hits you get. I got nearly 5 million hits the first time I searched on the term. ...

In the age of online entertainment, consumers get virtually unlimited choice of content and unlimited means to entertain themselves. They can stream their favorite episode of "Lost" from ABC.com, watch full-length movies on Hulu or even download episodes of shows like the "The Office" from NBCDirect, and they can do it all for free These choices of...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting part, and I was glad to see it When it announced the ...

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. Like everyone else, I will be publishing some new research this month as well, though I won't be ranking vendors this time...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively light, and the addition will strengthen the overa...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesperson. I am riding today with the knowledge that this mode of travel is going to again become the standard for business travel in the years ahead...