Articles by Denis

It's hard to avoid comparisons between Microsoft and Salesforce.com this week. While many see a zero sum game being played out in which Google plus Salesforce.com somehow equals a diminished Microsoft, I think there's more Late last week, Microsoft announced a new product, the Surface computer, occupying a category all its own. At the same time, Sa...

A miracle year comes along very rarely, though any single year could be one depending on the subject matter. For example, as a member of Red Sox nation, 2004 will always be a miracle year for me, because my team won the World Series after 86 years of futility -- the Cubs are still waiting for theirs The idea of a miracle year, or what highbrows re...

Do we still need venture capitalists in the software industry? Sounds like a no-brainer, but the question also reflects the disruption that is taking place in enterprise software -- initiated by Salesforce.com and accelerated with its unveiling of a company incubator in San Mateo, Calif For the record, I think there will always be a place for VCs ...

Last week, I got into the idea of evolution as it relates to the technology market and used Microsoft and Salesforce.com to illustrate the need to keep multiple plans percolating so that a company can take advantage of a move in the market Evolution is an important filter through which I view the world; some people see baseball metaphors but I wond...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced it has acquired content management software vendor Koral. At a luncheon served up at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year...

Two things impressed me about Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release: the community portal and the influence of the IdeaExchange on the direction of the product. A lot of people point to the portal as the more significant and I suppose it is, but maybe only by a whisker At the end of the day, each is really a single side of the same coin. Each is ab...

Six to eight weeks. That's about what it seems to take to get an on-demand solution up and running these days. This information comes from an analysis of nine on-demand vendors that we surveyed for our annual WizKids report which will be out this week What's good about that time interval is that it is about half of a quarterly reporting period, w...

I got a lot of mail on the piece I wrote last week about retail data collection. The mail ran two to one in support, but it was still interesting to gauge the reactions of those who think the notion of collecting data like ZIP codes, drivers license numbers and the like is kosher Perhaps the best response to those who think all the numerology has ...

Salesforce.com issued a press release last week that by now looks rather ho-hum by its standards. The company announced that Deloitte & Touche had signed on as a systems integration partner and that got me thinking about how many things have changed, and how many have not It wasn't that long ago that Marc Benioff was comparing Salesforce with Sieb...

I always chafe at the saying, "The proof is in the pudding" in part because it is a truncation of a longer phrase, but mostly because it means nothing by itself. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is how the phrase really goes, and it is the one thing that came to mind when I heard about SAP's announcement in Germany about a new business model and new mid-market products...

I had meetings last week with each of the big three on-demand CRM vendors -- Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite -- and made some observations. Sometimes I get complaints from some of them when I mention more than one in an article because they like to pretend that they are unique. My grudging conclusion after my meetings is that maybe they are right. Let me elaborate...

When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it On balance then, I think it wise to hide these predictions from children, the gullible, the insane, etc. Some people will look at this and see doom and gloom because there ...

Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo -- the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year This week, Salesforce announced what I think of as the other shoe, or the business side of the AppExch...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures game. The Apex language and the integration facility,...

One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear discussions of marketing ROI or to see marketing automation defined as a product set that had a lot in common with accounting...

You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (OOW), the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco represent only a small portion of the people all over the planet who know the company's products and use them in mission-critical business processes every day. More than that, it is a tribute to one man's vision of what information technology needed to become that started more than 30 years ago...

There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however The big announcement was Apex, Salesforce.com's programming language that wil...

I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certainly gotten a lot of play, though the "SMB" and "mid-market" descriptors have also been well aired out, and, in aggregate, those two groups might outspend the enterprise today...

I had my annual meeting with my friends at Walker Information the other day when they were in Boston talking about their latest report. I have written about Walker before, and it gives me pleasure to do so again -- and to point out that I have no business relationship with them; I just like what they do If you are not familiar with Walker, they ha...

Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the lead generation challenge faced by most marketers, but this approach does at least recognize the need to close a loop when a customer expresses a need and it offers a helpful solution...