Articles by Denis

As Winston Churchill famously said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Optimistically, out of COVID, the mother of modern crises, we can reasonably expect some upside In 2020 I have conducted as much CRM research as I have often produced in several years of more normal times. Vendors have the cash to get research done as well as a belief that, ...

Many people have worked at less than full speed over the last seven months or more, but some people managed to get more done than others. A raft of new technologies that impact CRM are about to be announced, but even without the latest announcements due now through October, there's a realization that we're coming full circle. Things we thought about and argued over decades ago are back, in different forms, with new solutions...

Technology's fall selling season is gearing up for year-end as it always does, coronavirus or not, and the CRM industry follows suit with some mods. The majors like Salesforce and Oracle, as well as fast followers like Zoho, are in hot pursuit of what's new -- and they're betting new in this context means a process orientation, not simply deliveri...

Salesforce announced big numbers in all of its financials when it reported its FYQ2 results this week. But we're accustomed to the CRM company reporting good results, so the biggest news to my mind comes from elsewhere: The company also announced that as of August 31, it will replace Exxon Mobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average It's often remark...

The IDC CRM market share numbers are in for 2019 and for the seventh consecutive year Salesforce leads the pack, this time with 18.4 percent of the market. Other big vendors trailing the leader include, SAP 5.3 percent, Oracle 5.2 percent, Microsoft 3.7 percent, and Adobe 3.6 percent The list is impressive, but the numbers are absolutely binky afte...

Oracle continues to be the big software vendor we love to hate. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the brash prognostications of founding CEO and current CTO Larry Ellison He once skipped an address at his Oracle OpenWorld conference to attend to his America's Cup racing team in its penultimate and successful race on San Francisc...

The emergency caused by the novel coronavirus is causing deep structural changes to how we do business. We don't sell or market the way we did before the virus, and it may be some time before we return to that model -- if indeed we ever do Even before the emergency, market research conducted by Beagle Research (my company, full disclosure) has conc...

Salesforce continues to offer new products in an expanding demonstration of its platform's relevance to business and society at large Lately they've focused on the COVID-19 crisis with products like the recently introduced Salesforce Anywhere, which helps businesses better organize their suddenly far flung affairs resulting from people working remo...

The pandemic might be changing the way we work, but much of the need for change in our CRM tools predates COVID-19. Nevertheless, Salesforce last week introduced some changes in its Marketing Cloud that couldn't have been timelier In much of the research I've been conducting this year, there's a distinct trend. Employees are well aligned with the d...

Company performance relies on how well a company is led, how engaged its employees are, and the quality of the technology at hand, which effectively means the tools employees can leverage. Certainly, there are metrics for all of this. But the trouble with metrics is that they are collected and administered by management which has a vested interest in the outcome of any survey...

Moving to the cloud was never going to be seamless or sudden. There was simply too much at stake for most companies to make a big switch. With the exception of many cloud native companies like Salesforce and NetSuite, most customers and vendors have had to find ways to transition from on-premise to cloud over the last 20 years, and those years have generated more, not fewer, options.

Some years ago, Marc Benioff told me he was not interested in developing back office apps that would compete with SAP and Oracle in the ERP and finance market. Many people, myself included, looked askance at that idea and wondered out loud how the company would continue to grow because, hey, there's front office and back office and nothing else right?...

I had a good conversation with a smart guy in Marin County over the weekend about the next normal. One thing he said seemed to be aimed at the heart of CRM. This impressed me because Kevin is not a CRM guy, though he started and successfully ran a couple of businesses for decades Kevin's contention is that the virus is removing a lot of spontaneity...

These are extraordinary times, in case you haven't noticed One of my contentions these days is that CRM is penetrating society to a point that it is taking on an outsized role, and I have called this the "CRMification" of society....

A little while ago I was recording a podcast with an up and coming CRM company focused on banks and credit unions, CRMNext, and one of the questions that came up involved what's on the CRM horizon. To be honest, no one really knows, but because I spend a lot of time trying to understand both this industry and the broader landscape, I am never without an opinion.

Oracle appears to be undergoing a kind of resurgence during the coronavirus crisis. Financial analysts are saying nice things about its ability to pay dividends even in tough times. Its technology, which always has been good, is seeing an interesting uptick All of this is buffing the company's image after years of yes-but responses from the market ...

You can reduce the story of CRM to a lot of things, especially its many component parts. Social networking, cloud computing and analytics are mentioned often. We don't need an exhaustive list, but if we stop there I think we miss a lot To me, CRM isn't about the parts, although, like most people following the industry, I get a modicum of joy whenev...

Oracle and Zoom Video Communications just entered a deal that, for once, is more about technological audacity than about dollars. The companies on Tuesday announced a partnership to host Zoom on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure In just a few months -- basically since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic -- Zoom has seen demand for its service...

One of my great CRM research interests has been investigating how things change, and that interest is not limited to CRM. There is similar evolution in fields that seem only remotely related -- like climate change, which I've written about extensively Generally, the change I find most interesting involves how disparate inventions seem to cluster wi...

Adobe just announced what it calls the first digital economy index. It seems like it's modeled after other indices usually kept by the federal government to measure economic output and consumption. The Adobe index captures only consumer consumption behavior, though Some of its insights include new shopping behavior, such as which products have beco...