Articles by Denis Pombriant

Incorporating analytics in a vendor's solution set was once enough to qualify the vendor as very forward looking and a leader in the market. I think that's true in CRM for sure, and this metric could be spreading. Ever since Salesforce introduced its Marketing Cloud at Cloudforce New York, however, that hasn't been enough Salesforce effectively rai...

I tried to wait a bit before commenting on the election and the Social CRM implications partly out of respect and in part to give everyone a chance to rev down. Besides, these observations have much more to do with social media than with any political party or policy initiative, so please believe me when I say I come in peace According to The New Y...

Microsoft is flying high, certainly internally, after four important announcements in the last couple of weeks: Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, its all-important new Surface tablet, and the MarketingPilot acquisition. It has also made some important announcements around Dynamics CRM. I was at one of its campuses last week for a couple of days' worth of briefings and conversations, so there is a lot to unpack and in the interest of not perseverating there may be some things that get scant attention here, not due to lack of interest, but for respect to your eyeballs. ...

This story was originally published on May 30, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series I was so looking forward to getting the Facebook IPO out of the way, and then splat, like a ripe tomato in the kisser, we have to learn that the underwriters might not have shared some pre-IPO information transparently. Enough al...

I spent a day last week in Boston attending a conference called the "Inbound Marketing Summit" organized by my friend and former analyst Allen Bonde. Inbound marketing IMHO is taking off in some important dimensions Inbound marketing is a cool idea that's been pushed by multiple companies recently. For instance, HubSpot held its user meeting early ...

It's been a little while since I wrote about the impact of energy costs on business, but just because I have been silent doesn't mean the issue is quiescent -- just the opposite. Demand is stronger than ever and supply is trying to catch up, but it will fail The result will be higher energy and transportation costs in the year ahead, and those high...

I went to Oracle OpenWorld as a guest of Oracle and came away with a variety of observations that I can share. Some of what I saw was under NDA and that will remain undisclosed, though I have to tell you that I did not see any labs or next-generation products beyond what my colleagues saw at the show. My secret experiences revolved around customer stories...

I've been at OpenWorld for two days as I file this, but so far I have little CRM-oriented material. CRM really kicks in on Wednesday when the company focuses on CX -- or customer experience -- the moniker that Oracle has given to much of its CRM focus CX is good for what Oracle is about and some of the announcements about private cloud and high cap...

It's over, Dreamforce that is, and I have gotten some needed sleep on the flight back to Boston. As I contemplate Dreamforce 2012 and its meaning, I have three observations First, it was what I expected it to be. If you refer back to my post just before the show opened my expectations were more than met. You might wonder about the timing of that po...

As you read this, Dreamforce 2012 is underway and Marc Benioff is giving his keynote presentation. I've been in San Francisco since Monday and have watched the city -- especially near the Moscone Center -- swell like a pumpkin on a vine in late summer. If Salesforce's 70,000 registered attendees doesn't impress you, consider that they have another 30,000 people attending a Web conference as well...

I made a decision this week that pleased me and will drive some of my thinking about the CRM business well into next year. I opened up a contest called the WizKids Award. That might not seem like much and it might seem self-serving for me to write about it but maybe there's more WizKids is an informal competition I have held most years for emerging...

Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed In that vein, what could be seen as the first golden age of marketing was really more the golden age of broad...

My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes (I assume) drilling down into more of the substance of their announcements. So far, ...

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names, in many cases renaming them. For a little backg...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The August doldrums were a time of clambakes and vacations. Now? Clambake, si! Vacation, no mucho!...

I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again That means I'm in the middle of writing up a report on some research that uberanalyst Esteban Kolsky and I did over the last few months, and smack in the middle of CRM Idol judging. Everything's fine, and I see some interesting parallels, and without gi...

I dropped a small stone in a large pool last week, and the ripples are still spreading. In a separate post I wrote that IT is over. I was very careful to say that IT is over as a disruptive innovation and as an economic engine, but few understood what I meant, so I thought this would be a good chance to clear it all up Strictly as an economic dri...

What's the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business lastquarter -- the first loss in a decades-long string of positive earnings from the world'sbiggest software company. Sheesh! Yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but the loss signals the breadthand depth of the impact that the tablet is having on the hardware market -...

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a vendor and its partners and supply chain, i.e. "the ecosystem." But itdoesn't stop there; it extends to the customer as well...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. ...