Articles by Denis Pombriant

Salesforce held its Connections 2016 user event in Atlanta earlier this month. About 7,000 people attended, but in the Georgia World Congress Center and airplane hangar, attendance seemed smallish Attendance might have been held down by Gov. Nathan Deal's slow response tovetoing a religious freedom law largely seen as discriminating against the LGB...

It has been 40 years since Bill Gates wrote his open letter to the software industry complaining that computer hobbyists were stealing his BASIC program. That was so long ago that Wikipedia has a picture of the source code for "Micro-Soft" BASIC on paper tape. A lot of things have changed since then In the 1970s when Microsoft was getting started, ...

Apple's earnings disappointment thudded into view last week in the middle of an afternoon of briefings at Oracle's Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas. In that context, it gave me a lot to think about -- especially the difference between a one-time earnings disappointment andsomething more serious I have a feeling that Apple is only...

Last year, I researched the impact of the proliferation of cloud computing on business. I know it sounds like a dry topic, but if you are a CIO or an application development manager, the results can have serious meaning Cloud computing has deeply penetrated the enterprise and SMB ranks, and 46.3 percent of respondents said they had four or more clo...

Zuora, the company that made its bones in subscription billing and payments, held its annual Subscribed user meeting in San Francisco last week and staked out some new turf It always has been focused on the back office, but its latest messaging included elements of the front office. Perhaps it's no surprise given CEO Tien Tzuo's history as an early...

There's an interesting connection between customer relationships in subscription businesses and loyalty, according to a recentarticle by Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. It had particular resonance for me, since I just wrote a (soon-to-be-available) book about customer loyalty myself My research is full of old-style approaches to customer loyalty that aren't r...

Remember when your mother used to yell up the stairs to get you to turn your music down? Sometimes, in the age before sensitivity awareness, your dad would do the yelling and he'd substitute noise for music. Ah, the good old days. Too bad they aren't here right now yelling at vendors ConsumerAffairs.com is the brainchild of James R. Hood, a former ...

Virtually every CPQ -- configuration, price and quote -- software vendor on the planet has a credible solution for the processes from which the category gets its name. That's the good news Unfortunately, the world has moved on....

For more than 50 years, the IT industry has followed a well-known script associated with emerging and evolving paradigms: First a product or category is introduced, then it gains wide market acceptance (or dies on the vine), followed by a long period when vendors and customers seek out ever more efficient ways to produce the thing Ultimately, the c...

Periodically, a blatantly silly idea gains currency, spreading throughout society, and it has one of two effects: Either it scares the heck out of people, or they become enraptured with its seeming plausibility Last week, The New York Timespublished a piece set as a dialog between two economics writers, Eduardo Porter and Farhad Manjoo, titled, "A ...

This is delicate and I will be scrupulously neutral in these paragraphs so as to offend no one, but I thought it would be fun to attempt an interpretation of the current political climate from the perspective and sensibilities of CRM Can this really work? You be the judge....

Salesforce is opening a can of snakes with its new Health Cloud, which became generally available this week Having worked in the healthcare software industry for many years in the last century, I have mixed feelings about the announcement. While I'm breathing a sigh of relief that an innovative company is taking on healthcare software at last, part...

One of the biases inherent in CRM is its orientation toward new business. This might sound strange to most people, but really, I think of it as the startup echo chamber It's a bias in part because CRM was invented by new companies for new companies. However, the "C" part, customer, involves more than simply acquiring new ones, especially for establ...

I was gobsmacked when I read this in Robert Gordon'sThe Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War: "Electric light, the first reliable internal combustion engine, and wireless transmission (radio) were all invented within the same three-month period at the end of 1879." It's a book full of surprises emanating...

It has been fun watching the rapid improvement of the marketing function over the last decade. The advance was in no small part due to the advances in marketing automation, and the marketing revolution is not over by a long shot However, I think we're bumping up against a ceiling, and the improvements we can expect that make marketing faster will p...

Nearly every generation sees the birth of what, for it, will define modern life going forward. As uncertain as the twenty-teens have been, in retrospect economists may point to this decade as being as important as the tipping points of the 1870s and 1920s If that turns out to be the case, there may be no better event to symbolize the beginning of t...

Whether you call it "industry CRM," "vertical CRM" or something else, the concept is gaining altitude. Not that it's new or ever been gone, but today's vertical CRM is different -- a constellation of quantitatively and qualitatively different and better CRM solutions than we've ever seen Vendors like Veeva, Vlocity and Salesforce are getting into t...

Last year, uber-analystEsteban Kolsky and I did a research project to better understand cloud computing's uptake and related issues, and last week Financial Force, our sponsor,made the results public The findings are interesting to me because they reveal a more or less typical adoption cycle for cloud, by which I mean that some of the downstream ef...

I spent part of last week listening to presentations about the customer of the future, and of course it made me think. As usual, I didn't think in a straight line As you've heard from me before, customers are still the human beings that walked out of the ice age 10,000 years ago or even the Cro-Magnons of 35,000 years ago. It takes geologic time to...

I've been trying to analyze modern rewards programs and customer loyalty recently for a project. It's a complex issue and so it is tricky to tease apart -- nothing like trying to defuse a bomb, but intellectually challenging for sure At the heart of the issue is a body of research that says rewards, as currently configured, don't work in the ways w...