Articles by Denis Pombriant

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's good symmetry here. I can't think of another purely social show or one focused on innovation. Most shows today are vendor-sponsored, which is good but different...

Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of articles at Business Insider that point in a different though not opposite direction "Oracle Is Starting to Look a Lot Like SFDC" makes t...

Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follows a conventional triple-tell approach too -- tell them what you're going to say, say it, tell them what you said. But each time Salesforce repeats itself, the messaging gets clearer. When Oracle does it, the message only gets louder...

Salesforce.com announced it was buying Buddy Media for nearly US$700 million on Monday. In any discussion, that's a lot of money, maybe more than Salesforce has yet spent on any acquisition. What's going on? As you might expect, I see economics playing an important role here, and I think there are two issues to consider. They may even boil down...

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 already! Bankers appear to be tone deaf to the fallout from their gross behavior. If you want an historical comparison, I think you need to go all the way back to the Renaissance and the Borgia popes. But no matter. ...

Last week was like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. You know how at the end they fire off a huge flourish of explosives, and if you live in Boston for some reason the Boston Pops play "The 1812 Overture?" It was like that minus the Pops. Actually, the crescendo was not limited to last week but to a rolling thunder effect that happened because many software companies have decided Q2 is a good time for analysts to visit the Bay Area...

This spring has seen a raft of software company events and announcements, and they've been good meetings full of real news and important new developments. It is as if these companies bided their time during the worst of the recession, building new product, thinking about the future and how customers will use their technologies. It was time well spent...

There was an interesting article about airlines in The New York Times last week, "When Flying 720 Miles Takes 12 Hours," but the subtext was all about CRM, or at least where CRM has to go. If you know me at all, you know I closely attend to macroeconomics and energy issues, and they are all over this article The story documented how small regional...

I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in college (yes, in Middle English and no, it wasn't that long ago), and now every April brings me back to the opening verses about springtime and renewal. This April was especially memorable in our industry, and as the month has just passed I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the things I witnessed Mostl...

This might be the year we look on in hindsight as the time Oracle got its groove back. It is well known that CEO Larry Ellison thinks in 10-year cycles and about how the industry seems to morph like a caterpillar about every decade. He's not the only one. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has referenced the decadal cadence, and others have too...

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen (i.e. mobile) should take note of last week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry. It represents a big trend by emerging comp...

Thanks for the overwhelming response to last week's post, "Why CRM Works." It was surprising and gratifying that so many people read and tweeted about it, given its length -- almost double my usual contribution. Since it was based on Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking work, I give all the credit to him and his great career in trying to understand how we think...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing, or how we perceive issues based on what other information surrounds them...

Note to self: Write something nice about Microsoft Convergence 2012. They did a great job in Houston, and most importantly you can really see the CRM focus coming together with social, mobile, analytics, back office and a lot more. It's taken a long time because there are a lot of moving parts for Microsoft, but Convergence was impressive To get a...

If you read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you get a good sense of the rivalry between Jobs and Bill Gates and Microsoft, or between Apple and the rest of the world more generally. But the rivalries were really between that past/present -- and the future -- and Jobs and Gates were only playing parts that were scripted long ago The play's outlines ...

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space. Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it cost to get IT infrastructure now that Micr...

Yammer announced an impressive $85 million financing recently. You can get the details here You might already know that Yammer provides enterprise social networks, the kind of collaborative spaces that enable employees to "swarm" on issues to achieve resolution or deal with a customer issue, for instance. Yammer claims that more than 85 percent o...

You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator -- with the exception of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) that subscription companies measure -- it only tells you where you've been, not where you are going We could very profit...

I spent the best part of last week cruising up and down Silicon Valley, checking in with customers and would-be clients. The consensus from this non-scientific survey is that business is better than OK, and most people are expecting this year to be the best in a while. Of course, there is a cloud -- literal and figuratively -- to go with that silver lining. After all, we're bouncing off a long fall to what's still a soft bottom...

Last week Oracle bought the HR SaaS company Taleo for US$1.9 billion, which to me means it's time to do you-know-what to the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt is officially over and out The hunt in question is for legitimacy and primacy of the SaaS and cloud computing model. Many people would argue that legitimacy happened when Salesforce had ...