Articles by Denis

This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted to improve the way you sell. I can remember a DOS (disk operating system) version of the product that would look almost alien in comparison to today's slick GUI (graphical user interface) version. ...

Kathleen Gilroy, cofounder of Swift Media Networks in Boston, eats, lives and breathes Web 2.0. Not only is her latest business venture focused on Web 2.0 services for conferences, but she's also used just about every Web-based tool there is to run her own various startups. With five full-time staff members, she has become a well-seasoned user of blogs, wikis, collaboration tools and just about any other free or low-cost service she can leverage.

This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0 The whole idea of "sustainability" deserves some contemplation. Too often we see the word applied to just about anything that needs to look a little bit green. Sustainability and related words absolve a multit...

Firing up a brand-new PC is a magic moment that can never be recaptured. The flawless performance, the lightning-fast speeds, the uncluttered desktop -- they're a thing of beauty. In time, though, just about all PC users will have to cope with their share of problems, from sluggish download speeds to out-and-out system failures For anyone with the ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for US$105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering Peeling the onion and trying to get beyond the cash, this is an imp...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow ...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I knew and understood that platform pretty well and the jolt of cutting over cold turkey was both surprising and refreshing...

Part 1 of this two-part series examined the effects phishing can have on a business as phishers target smaller businesses. Part 2 looks at its impact on Web users If one were to look for sure bets in the online world, phishing would be right up there on the growing list of security concerns. The art of phishing has been a remarkable study in techno...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading themes at the moment Over the last couple of weeks, I h...

It's been on the radar of USA Credit Union's IT department for three years. They all knew about it. They were watching it every day. They had also heard rumblings that more and more of their industry counterparts had fallen victim to the attackers, Daniel Schneider, the credit union's senior manager of IT, told TechNewsWorld Phishing was definitely...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz A recession happens when:...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a need for something else, partly because the market ...

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. Good show, nice people, well run, and it was held at a swanky new Westin on the waterfront. It got me thinking, though, about the "two-dot-oh" phenomenon and how badly it needs a rethink See, the problem -- whether we're dealing with Enterprise 2.0 or (maybe) CRM 2.0 or Anything 2.0 -- is ...

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfied with the classical model of economics and began looking for an explanation that better represented the facts that they saw daily...

I once played organized football -- not that I was any good at it, but I played it with relish. My favorite parts were anything that had to do with disrupting the opponent's carefully planned plays, which included covering kickoffs and punts as well as regular defense. This bit of information has almost nothing to do with this column except that it points out an early character trait (some would say flaw) that has perversely influenced my career...

After a long build-up, I think we're finally at the real beginning of a new era in computing. The previous (nearly) 10 years have laid an important foundation, by which I mean on-demand computing, but if you thought that was it, I think the next few years could blow you away Take a look at the driving forces in computing today -- they at least incl...

Zuora introduced itself to the world this week, and while it is not a typical CRM company, its position should have a big impact on CRM and all other markets that offer on-demand solutions. Founders Tien Tzuo, K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou, formerly of Salesforce.com and WebEx, chose the usually sedate billing market because they have a new idea that looks like it has legs...

I sometimes forget about the fact that people are trying to do business and that their business is top of mind -- not CRM. That point was brought home to me last week when I was on-site with a client I won't give too many details, but the company has no CRM per se, just some spreadsheets they use for forecasting, a customer database shared with ER...

I have been investigating the possibility that social networking is something that can be used inside an organization -- "intra-organizationally," as my bureaucratic friends might say. That should really be no surprise -- the entire employee base is a natural community, though in many companies the group is small enough that good old face-to-face communication works pretty well. There's at least one place, though, where community-oriented techniques not only work, but also can have a lot to do with profit and loss...

This is one of my favorite times of year because it's announcement season, the time when all sorts of vendors book briefings to tell me about what's new in their worlds. It has been a busy couple of weeks, and I expect the briefing deluge to continue for the rest of the quarter. I love this because I have a ringside seat to what's happening, and ...