Articles by Denis Pombriant

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "what's valuable in this pile?" to "how can we slice...

About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. I believed that for two reasons. First, I believed social media was inevitable, though I had no idea what form it would take. Facebook was not on my radar and had not officially launched, MySpace was something for kids, and Twitter had defini...

Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America It seems to have worked, because even though New York is one of the most cosmopolitan o...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a lot of emphasis on marketing. Microsoft presented se...

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity...

For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision First there was Windows 7, which was pretty good. Then came Windows 8, Windows 8 Phone, the Surf...

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 However, it is also the unspoken issue in the Yahoo brouhaha about working from home -- the idea whose name shall not be spoken. How else to...

"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were as impressive as much for their brevity as for their meaning The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why profession...

Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? I mean it. The ecosystem -- and maybe not even social -- is the story of the last five years. While many of us have been running around like Chicken Little talking up the advantages that social will bring us, the eco...

Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which can accommodate the maintenance facilit...

I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! (Venerable ACT! if you ask me) and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market Buying and owning three CRM applications migh...

I have been known to do things for money. I bet you have too, but doesn't it sound funny to put it that way? I just got off a phone briefing with Freshdesk, an Indian company with a subscription customer service and support system that it refers to as a "helpdesk."

Last week Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new wayto analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very largeindeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" (TDA) and hearing about it has the feelof hearing about relativity for the first time (or Salesforce.com) and learning thatspace is curved.

For a long time, many people have been predicting the demise of ERP, and while I share those sentiments, a demise can take many forms. The one we all understand well is the crash-and-burn variety, but that's not the only and perhaps not even the predominant approach. The crash is at best the final step. Humpty Dumpty must have teetered and lost h...

A lot happened while you weren't looking. A stream of articles in December, especially, the week between the holidays, seemed to tie up some of 2012's loose ends and some point to significant changes in the years ahead. They also highlight the difference between hardware and software In software, we've been lulled into the belief that things change...

Everyone has a year-end synopsis these days, and it's fun to see what each person deems important. Sometimes you wonder if you lived through the same experiences, but it's a good thing to recall everything one more time and maybe reconsider how you'll remember each. Here's my synopsis -- which is no more or less valid than anyone else's. Marketin...

I was doing some research in the Time Magazine archives (the best ones I have seen, by the way) the other day and came across this nugget from 1962: "Despite the discouraging results so far, many scientists argue that military-space research will ultimately produce an overflowing cornucopia of marketable consumer products, from supersonic planes to...

On Dec. 6, Apple announced that it would begin making some Macs in the U.S., reversing a trend building over several years of manufacturing computers in China and setting an interesting precedent. Apple isn't alone in this: HP has also begun shifting some of its PC production back to the U.S. of A Before we start popping French champagne corks (isn...

Has the emergence of social technology been faster than the rollout of other advanced technologies like CRM and ERP? If it has, why? I have recently been reading a dense technical book from 1990 with the improbable title -- for CRM -- The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures -- Dynamics of Evolution and Technological Change in Transport, by Arnulf Grub...

Have you voted yet? Not in the presidential election -- this is more important! I am talking about voting in the CRM Idol competition. It's time! OK, I know what you are thinking: What is CRM Idol? It's the brainchild of Paul Greenberg, and its purpose is to find the hottest emerging company in the front-office market. So far this year, we've ident...