Articles by Denis Pombriant

I read the accounts of Twitter's S-1 announcement in The New York Times last week, and there were a few representative tweets in the article. My favorite was, "This is Peak Twitter," implying it was time to sell -- but that overlooks the inconvenient idea that except for the secondary markets, there isn't anything to sell yet or a place for most ...

It's easy to be blinded by the obvious. It happens in business all the time. Something is right in front of you, but you attribute its effect to a different cause. I see this most typically when observing a paradigm shift -- the reason for the shift is not always the obvious causative agent. For example, Dell became a great producer of PCs -- de...

It is an old truism of economics that supply drives its own demand. While this is true, it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, a boatload of hula hoops could conceivably inspire a new generation of kids to pick up the toy, and nostalgic adults of a certain age might be compelled to see if they could still "do it," but it's just as likely that the supply would not spark much interest...

One of the more interesting aspects of CRM Evolution, which was held in New York last week, is how many emerging companies attended and appear to be doing well. The big guys were there too -- either with booths or through attendance by senior people. You can get a false sense of the marketplace if you only attend Salesforce.com's Dreamforce, Microsoft Convergence, SAP Sapphire, or Oracle OpenWorld...

Am I making up a term? Maybe This column is inspired by the continuing dreadful news out of PC land. Last week Dell announced its profits for the just finished quarter dropped 72 percent year over year and Lenovo took over the No. 1 one spot in PC manufacturing from HP, though both companies saw declines....

I've been having so much fun lately that I may have missed something, but let me ask -- have we already reached the end of the customer experience trend? I think CX still has a lot of life in it, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment "CX" is a nebulous term and idea, and its discussion leads to all kinds of confusion about its meaning. Is ...

One of the subtexts to the marketing automation explosion is analytics. Having a CRM system might make you wonder why marketing automation is needed at all, but the reasons boil down to analysis and improved data collection Let me share some information with you from a new marketing study I did this summer. First, the data: We asked marketers if ...

Sage Summit, held in Washington, D.C., this week, was a more upbeat event than it has been over the last two years. During that interval, the company has had the thankless task of telling its customers and partners that it was making big changes and that things would be better. The news was not always welcomed for all the reasons you can imagine. ...

In a move that surprised me, at least, Amazon last week announced that it was lowering its fees for on-demand infrastructure by as much as 80 percent. Should we be rejoicing, or is this a sign that something is amiss? Back around the turn of the century, something similar happened in at least two situations. The first was that telecommunications ...

I still see far too many examples of content confusing the ideas of data and information. Sometimes it seems a writer is simply trying to avoid being redundant when using data and information in the same sentence to mean the same thing. Of course, they are different, and the result is unnecessary confusion. I just wrote a paper for a European l...

I think I have used this title before, but this is in a whole different context. Also, this is a short piece because I know you are likely out contributing to the leisure economy as you should be. This will be here when you get back. I couldn't help but make one more comment on the Oracle-Salesforce announcements of last week because I see them as an important watershed...

OK, the title's a cheap riff on the T.S. Elliot book of poems that inspired Cats. You have to start somewhere and that's as good a place as any -- but stay with me, this goes places. A big group of cats is called a "clowder." What if we could access a clowder of big data? Big Data has been taking up a big part of my conscious life lately, what ...

Pegasystems held PegaWorld in "PegOrlando" this week, and a good show it was. I have always wondered about the difference between CRM (social and otherwise) and BPM, or business process management, so I was happy to attend Both CRM and BPM deal with the interaction between the vendor and customer, and each is involved in doing the things that make...

I seem to be doing a lot of research and writing about Big Data and related issues this year. I am taking a lot of briefings from emerging analytics companies too, and I see it all as net good because the emphasis on data and analytics is really an emphasis on information -- and that is an economic indicator of sorts for me The thirst for customer...

Siebel saved my life. Not really but sort of. By the early 1990s, I had been selling software for what seemed like a lifetime and dealing with the typical frustrations of life in sales. There weren't enough leads, and there was always more work to do than you could squeeze into a day. I kept records on legal pads and file folders, and I had a Rolodex that I would never update because it was way too much work. And then there was forecasting. ...

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny tiny screen mounted on a frame over their eyebrows. It's all very Buck Rogers or Dick Tracy or Special Forces -- or just so last week, depending on your worldview...

This story was originally published on March 20, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. We have this idea of modern computing that is closely tied to social media, and rightly so. Social media is a kind of glue that ties us together in new and bigger configurations than our own human capabilities....

There are two questions that emerging companies in the CRM space hear when they face the analysts: When are you going public?...

It's been wonderful this spring, being a part of all the vendor briefings now in high gear. That's because in short but sometimes painfully dense bursts, we get to know what each vendor has in store for the months ahead. It's a lot and that's a good sign. There seems to be a breakout happening One of the themes running through all the events -- lik...

It hit me last week while attending Oracle's Analyst World briefing. We met in a conference center on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores to learn about the company's latest developments in hardware and software, and to be briefed on its future road map. How extensive was it? Let's just say that my brain hurt when it was over, and I had to sign a ...