Articles by Denis Pombriant

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff invited a select group of press, analysts and customers to a fiscal year kickoff presentation overlooking San Francisco and environs. It was held on the 23rd floor of one building that the company monopolizes, just across Mission Street from another that it is building and the bay beyond. It's a nice view Salesforce star...

For an article that lands on the social marketer like a proverbial ton of bricks, check out "What's the Value of a Like?" in the March-April issue of the Harvard Business Review "Social media doesn't work the way many marketers think it does. The mere act of endorsing a brand does not affect a customer's behavior or lead to increased purchasing, no...

Seeking Alpha is an online outfit that offers investors good research and analysis on tech vendors, and it is especially well versed in Oracle. Its writers' expertise involves matching technologies to investment attractiveness. I am sure you are familiar with the type. XYZ company's product does this, it should result in sales of this much, and t...

I got a wakeup call from reading "You Need to Manage Digital Projects for Outcomes, Not Outputs," a Harvard Business Review article by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The headline says it all. How many times have we been lulled into complacency over getting a project or a product done but not necessarily well received, because it was someone else's ...

Oracle last week announced the acquisition of Apiary, a small company that tucks into its product line and will not make much of a splash in the financial pages or possibly even in tech circles. Nonetheless, it's important strategic news The value of the deal wasn't publicized -- but given the parameters, the dollars will get lost in the rounding o...

At OpenWorld, Oracle jumped into the artificial intelligence and machine learning space for its customer experience products (aka customer relationship management) and other applications (like human capital management) with an interesting difference -- a huge data store to help educate the algorithms that work for you. We're waiting for products to be delivered this year.

Oracle recently held a call for analysts to discuss its results for the last quarter, and there were multiple bright spots. It was much like a similar call 90 days previous, and together the calls drove home the conclusion that Oracle is turning into a cloud company. A casual observer might not be convinced, since the macro numbers show a company ...

There's an interesting article about customer service agents in the latest Harvard Business Review, authored by Matthew Dixon and associates at CEB, that I think is worth a look It's widely understood that new customer service channels such as social, email, knowledge bases, and the like have left the service agent with harder problems to solve. Th...

Traditionally in this year-end piece, I peer into my cloudy crystal ball and forecast the year ahead in CRM. Sometimes I'm close, other times not, but either way, my predictions quickly are forgotten. This year, I've decided just to say what I want rather than what realistically might happen. Since my vote has all of the authority of yesterday's news, it will follow the prognostications of years past.

We've become obsessed with big data and analyzing it, though sometimes I think we get in our own way. The issue is that we preferentially collect quantitative data as if it were the only thing worth the time. In fact, quantitative data is but one kind of data, and the information it provides gives a one-dimensional view of the world. It's not wrong information -- just incomplete.

An opinion piece published this week in The New York Times gets something exactly wrong. In "Facebook Shouldn't Fact-Check," Jessica Lessin argues that it's not Facebook's job to fact-check the growing flood of fake news coming at us through its portal and social media more generally. She does have a point, but I think she doesn't take things far enough...

Oracle recently announced a new connection between its Service and IoT clouds. That makes total sense to me. I bet a lot of folks think of the Internet of Things as those machines that do things directed by algorithms -- and if so, they might wonder why they need to be connected to customer service, such an obviously human channel. It's not off base, however...

Since its founding in 2007, Zuora has been the champion of the subscription economy, as a differentiator for companies that sell products as services and have to bill and collect monthly rather than engaging in a single one-time transaction. Few people realize how complex it is to run a business that requires customers to pay little up front but m...

It's been a rough couple of months, and we should talk about something fun and not political, but CRM-centric. I know! Let's ask how the election influenced CRM. Seriously, there's a nugget in there that ought to get us all thinking about business and keep our minds off that other stuff. Come on, it'll be fun I am not the only one who saw this, but...

I've been writing about customer loyalty a lot -- and not just to sell my book, though you can buy it any time you want. Seriously, though, markets everywhere are cooling. They once were ripe with new categories and products, but everybody now seems to have the new stuff, and growth is falling back to the baseline of organic growth. That's why loy...

The recently released spreadsheet hacked from Salesforce board member Colin Powell's email names multiple companies that Salesforce was at least considering acquiring. In the aftermath of the initial reports, it's worth noticing that there were at least two enterprise resource planning/back office companies on the list: Workday and NetSuite. Sales...

This is going to be political but you won't be able to tell which side I'm on (if you choose to read on). You might ask, why on Earth would I get involved even tangentially in politics right now? The simple answer is that it impacts CRM and I have a viewpoint -- but as I say, I'm not picking or revealing a side I've been doing research in business ...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have taken the industry by storm. Some say they will usher in a new age of better business processes and customer orientation, while others fret that automation will kill jobs. Both might be true There definitely will be jobs that no longer make sense for humans to do, thanks to automation. Generally th...

Dreamforce for many years has been too big for a single person to cover. While I participate in covering events like this, inevitably I am reduced to the story of the three blind people and the elephant. You can't experience enough of the elephant to describe it unless you can see it. Using your hands leaves you frustrated. In the case of Dreamforce, you can't go to all of the sessions...

There recently has been an increase in the talk -- pro and con -- about bots, AI and intelligent assistants. A lot of this talk has been percolating around the industry for decades. Silicon Collar, a book by Vinnie Mirchandani, a friend and truly gifted analyst, accepts that automation might be eliminating jobs, but it optimistically holds out for...