Articles by Denis

It's okay to give ourselves kudos for CRM's resiliency over the course of the pandemic. We did a heck of a job keeping most of the balls in the air We did our minor miracle by leveraging the platforms on which most CRM systems are based these days. Vendors and customers built or enhanced systems designed to turn whims into orders and then into prod...

For most of my professional life, before I became an analyst, I was a sales rep, and my forte was software. Back in the mini-computer era, nothing was easier, and then harder, than selling software Early on, it took almost nothing to sell some basic application development tools. Businesses knew they needed automation, and there was relatively litt...

For those born after the mini-computer era (co-terminus with the original Star Trek), dilithium is the fuel used to power a warp core propulsion system needed for interstellar travel Dilithium is both naturally occurring and rare, and when it melts, from overuse of the warp core, the starship is basically kaput. This metaphor makes sense if you kee...

I've been on and off trying to get a handle on Zoho for a long time, feeling that calling it an SMB solution didn't do it justice, but I was stumped. The company provides roughly 50 apps and more services and widgets in a product set that culminates in Zoho One -- which Zoho bills as "The Operating System for Business." My biggest challenge has bee...

This is not good A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new, and Replicant, an AI-based customer service platform, is not the only vendor to ring the alarm....

Let's start a new meme/hashtag/acronym: Global Information Network, or GIN. I know there's double entendre here, but we're entitled to have a modicum of fun in life, no? I've been writing about the coming of an information utility for a while but even my visions don't match what we're watching unfold. Briefly, it occurred to me a while ago that in...

I was doing research when I found a suitable definition of levels of abstraction. Honestly, it's a topic most of us know intuitively without ever fully defining it, like rain. Rain is water droplets that fall from the sky but few of us think about how and why clouds form and weather fronts move. We just know rain, also snow, and when pressed we bother tracking weather movements to see if a planned outdoor activity makes sense. But I wouldn't say that's understanding rain...

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that, in some ways, defies description For the CRM rank and file, there were plenty of announcements and enhancements -- and for others, some tantalizing views of what may be coming in future releases....

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company Although the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol will still read CRM when this is done, Salesfo...

I try not to write too much about earnings because I'm an analyst more focused on how things work -- or don't -- than I am on how much money a company makes. That's largely because I got into the CRM space before companies made money on it. In later market stages, products work, and the interest is in how predictable the company's earnings are But ...

As a system of record, Salesforce, as well as just about every other SFA vendor, has stayed scrupulously neutral in the sales process debate of the last couple of decades. That is now changing, sort of A sales process is a set of protocols that an organization uses to conduct selling. One's process needs not be complex, many organizations settle on...

We are all trying to make sense of the new world we inherited from Covid. But it isn't just the pandemic that's shifting society; other macro events like what to do about the unfolding climate disaster (fix it, but how?) add an important dimension and all of it influences the direction of CRM for the foreseeable future But a key question looms: Are...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration There's an important caveat here though. Salesforce has always been about process improvements that drive revenue and speed deals. Virtually every CRM...

There's a virtuous circle pattern being drawn in society by CRM and it's been ongoing for many years already First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at ...

It looks like we're ending Salesforce Season. This is a new idea for me, and I think there may be two seasons in a year -- the one we're finishing and one that happens just before Dreamforce. Roughly speaking, these seasons happen when the company disgorges a raft of new technologies both to update existing products and to bring forth new ones This...

It's time to call it. We're through the looking glass and work is fundamentally changing. I had been thinking that once the pandemic was sufficiently behind us, we'd see people flocking back to the office and that would be that I marveled that Salesforce went so far out of its way to quickly develop Work.com and Salesforce Anywhere to support a wor...

Not too long ago, commerce executives worried about how to make their digital systems as good as in-person interaction. They had reason to worry, too There were too many systems, each with its own data, and most of the information needed to, for instance, sell a mortgage was in someone's head, and too often, that person wasn't in the conversation.

I have that same feeling I had when I started my career in the mini-computer era because what was old is becoming new again In the 1980s, the discussion was all about hardware and which company would be the first to build a processor capable of one million instructions per second -- or one MIP as it was called. Data and software weren't significant...

Various CRM vendors have been issuing interesting survey results from the pandemic that purport to show the "new normal" in full flower. Salesforce did so recently, and now Oracle is getting into the act While the data generated from these and many other surveys is interesting and drives much discussion, the information content we intuit may not be...

The big questions about reopening the global economy and what new moves portend are coming in for analysis. The results, if you try to munge it all together, are frankly mud We'd all like the pandemoclypse to be over and out so that we can focus on the new normal but it's not clear what that normal is -- some of which is predicated on vaccination r...