Articles by Denis

Last week I discussed one of the emerging hot spots in front office software, partner relationship management or PRM. This week I thought it would be interesting to take a look at another perennially emerging area -- wireless I got the idea sitting next to a wireless expert on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. He told me that more than 5...

I was in Chicago for a few days of R&R when Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at the Microsoft partner meeting in Boston. As a result, I got news of the company's latest projected delivery dates for its on-demand CRM not from Microsoft, but from Paul Greenberg's blog: "On Demand Means Right This Second, Even for Microsoft." Greenberg makes some good points and I completely agree with him that the second quarter of 2007 is a long time to wait given the speed of evolution we have been seeing in the on-demand market...

Identifying a paradigm shift is most easily done in hindsight because separating a fad from a long term trend is something that requires a bit of historical perspective to get right. About the only professionals who make it a habit of prognosticating about changing trends are economists and, as the saying goes, they have reliably predicted 13 out of the last 5 recessions...

Last week I mentioned a white paper I wrote a couple of years ago that addresses some of the changes we can expect to come from the on demand development and deployment paradigm and I thought it would be interesting to examine some of the main points here The title of the piece is "The New Garage" for a very specific reason. I believe that on dema...

Remember demand? It was always seen with supply and it was used to make markets until some wise guys told us that the two could go their separate ways. If you keep all things constant except for supply you can run the table, or so they said It reminds me of the old joke about the poet, the engineer and the economist stuck on a desert island and d...

I am a bit of an economics junkie. My interest in the dismal science carries over from my interest in evolution and can be summarized as, why things are the way they are and how they got that way. I am currently finishing up a book that gets me where I live, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction & Economics by Paul Ormerod. This is no crackpot author, Ormerod was head of the Economics Assessment Unit at The Economist and he has taught economics at the university level. Nevertheless, perhaps another, more positive, way to look at the same phenomena is simply to acknowledge that nothing is permanent...

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling Ahh, the 90s, lots of people in sales tell me you didn't make sales calls in the 90s, it was more like making appointments to take orders. Gurus of selling like Jim Dickie of CSO Insights, reported that, for a while, the percentage of sales represen...

On Wednesday NetSuite made five announcements designed to catapult it into a leadership position in the on-demand, or software as a service (SaaS), market In no particular order the company announced its version 11.0 release, informed the world that this release is fully AJAX infused, introduced a scripting language for customizing business process...

At first I did not know how to react to the news that AOL and Yahoo were going to be charging companies to guarantee delivery of e-mail. Was I supposed to feel good as a CRM person that a new avenue of message delivery was opening up, or was I supposed to man the barricades as a consumer to protest this invasion of my space? To bring you up to spe...

I spoke with a group of investors last week about the importance of the emerging field of platform technology. They were interested in investing in a company that was looking for additional late round funding and they wanted to know a few things. What is the market for this new technology? Who will buy it? Isn't the market already saturated with applications and application technology?...

I have been wracking my brain for an adequate metaphor to describe the situation that has developed in the CRM world and in enterprise software in general It started about two years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle looked at the enterprise software market and decided that SAP could conquer the world unless it was checked. At the time, enterprise s...

I had a wide-ranging conversation the other day with a software company CEO in Silicon Valley. If anyone could have insights into what's been going on lately in the software industry it would be this guy. He's a former Oracle executive -- that doesn't exactly limit the field much does it? -- and a keen observer of the front office software market. I won't use his name because we were discussing something else for background, mostly the future of the enterprise software business...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for the shareholders to derail this one since many have been clamoring for greater returns on their investments for quite a while. And don't look to the SEC to stop this one either. Unlike Peoplesoft, Siebel wants to be acquired, so the whole process should go much faster...

I saw a quote the other day from the CEO of a new hosted CRM company that really got me thinking. Describing his company's introduction, he optimistically quipped, "The second mouse gets the cheese." What he meant was that now that the category is defined, it should be relatively easy for his company to gain market share. But in my experience, thin...

Shoshana Zuboff is a genius, but don't just take my word for it. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote a book called The Support Economy with her husband and collaborator, James Maxmin. What makes Zuboff a genius is that although I think the book is about CRM, there is only one paragraph specifically referring to CRM in ...

Tom Siebel announced this week that he is giving up the daily grind of running the company he started and instead plans to concentrate on his role as chairman of the board. Taking over as CEO is Mike Lawrie, a 26-year IBM veteran There's no doubt that Siebel will continue to have a great influence on the company he founded, but with so many layers ...