Articles by Denis Pombriant

Something tells me that if Salesforce already leaked news about its new AI product, Einstein, that it might not be the biggest news that will emerge from Dreamforce next week. However, I also think Einstein will be involved in whatever is the big takeaway Salesforce has become rather large, with US$8 billion-plus in revenue. A member of the Fortune...

Larry Ellison was having too much fun. In his second keynote of this year's Oracle OpenWorld user conference, he was talking about his company's database, Oracle 12c, and comparing it highly favorably to Amazon's competing databases. It seems Ellison always has fun, which is one likely reason that the 72 year-old CTO and executive chairman of the board, looks 52, sounds 42, and probably feels 32.

Automation has a habit of killing jobs, which has been true since the Industrial Revolution. However, it seems that we're discovering this truth all over again. We easily forget when we focus only on the job-creation aspects of automation, and that usually gets us in trouble. Since the IR, there have been five distinct economic waves lasting betwe...

The Sunday keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld were good -- especially when compared with prior years -- but they still suffered from the perennial problem of trying to stuff too much content into a two-hour event. Diane Bryant, SVP at Intel and a big Oracle partner, spent an hour covering a very broad landscape and she did it with verve....

A common perception of business agility is that it revolves around quickness, especially quickness in the service of accelerating a deal or transaction. That's a good starting point, but agility actually goes deeper -- especially now that so many structural changes, like cloud computing and subscriptions, have turned up the dial on everyday business...

Salesforce isn't waiting for Dreamforce to begin the drumbeat for its artificial intelligence offering, which is—or will be—called "Einstein." There is so much to discuss about this turn of events that it's hard to begin, so rather than starting at a conventional jumping-off point, I'll start with the name You couldn't have lived at any point i...

It's easy to lose sight of people in a CRM discussion, focusing instead on the great technology and what it lets us do under optimum circumstances. We should keep the customer in mind at all times, however, for without them what are we? Forgetting the customer is dangerous both for customers and vendors in this social age. Far from being a univers...

What's the direction of the software industry? As an analyst, I might ask this several times a week, but it's not idle curiosity. Things are changing, and today's events are signaling a significant shift. The rollout of Software as a Service and the emergence of relatively good platforms -- which will only get better -- suggest to me that the soft...

This is the fourth post in a four-part series on modern approaches to improving customer loyalty through customer engagement The 4 Fundamental Attributes of Customer Loyalty, Part 1...

We've seen a rapid progression from conventional software bought through a license to cloud-based solutions that sell for a song -- and in theory could sell through barter at some point. I am not a big fan of zero marginal cost economics, in which prices drop to zip because buyers take into account only the cost of the marginal good and not the ti...

This is the third post in a four-part series on modern approaches to improving customer loyalty through customer engagement. The 4 Fundamental Attributes of Customer Loyalty, Part 1...

The platform land rush is definitely on. You can't swing a dead cat, as the saying goes, without finding an announcement about some new platform or some established vendor's attempt to enhance its existing platform. Some sorting out seems to be in order What's not a platform these days?...

This is the second post in a four-part series on modern approaches to improving customer loyalty through customer engagement. The 4 Fundamental Attributes of Customer Loyalty, Part 1...

This summer has started out to be anything but a somnolent day at the beach. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU is enough to disturb your slumber, and that's not the only thing on the plate. To be frank, it appears we are at one of those major historical transition points that might happen a few times in any of our lives. Without being ove...

This is the first post in a four-part series on modern approaches to improving customer loyalty through customer engagement. As I see it, there are four basic capabilities, or attributes, needed to build better customer loyalty. I learned about them from two McKinsey researchers, David C. Edelman and Marc Singer, in "Competing on Customer Journey...

Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn for more than US$26 billion has created quite a stir -- at least in my world. According to Ross Mayfield, a colleague at the Enterprise Irregulars, Ellen Levy reported that the deal can boast a number of superlatives if you look at it right: the largest sale of a consumer Internet company in history;...

Salesforce held TrailheaDX in San Francisco last week -- its first event just for software developers. The company previously relied on special sessions at events such as Dreamforce to educate developers, but its declared intention to train up to 100 million of them in its Lightning development environment dictated taking additional action The numb...

I start a lot of client engagements with a simple question: Who's the customer? It's amazing the answers that I get. Some people are really quite good. They know the customer's demographic and business or personal needs, and they focus on those things. Others don't even grasp the difference between a customer and a consumer You might expect this if...

Software vendors and their business customers have tried many things to increase customer loyalty, but they have been disappointed more often than not. Rewards, delight, and daily deals were good ideas to help spur customer loyalty. Unfortunately, they weren't enough to move the loyalty needle in today's highly competitive markets. We're all famil...

My friend and a partner atWildcat Venture Partners, Bruce Cleveland, along with his associates, has come up with an idea that helps explain why some early-stage companies thrive and thus raise more capital, while others die on the vine As a venture capitalist, he is always trying to figure this out, trying to determine who gets another round of fun...