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What a week. It's amazing how much news you can make by throwing around a few billion dollars. We found that out by observing the sound (though maybe not the fury) of SAP and Oracle placing billion dollar bets on the future outlines of the enterprise software industry. In the last week or so, Oracl...

It is turning into a busy end of the year with the CRM and Software as a Service industries advancing on multiple fronts. So far, we've had Dreamforce and all of the announcements that went with it. SAP has announced SAP Business ByDesign, available in 2008, and last week made NetWeaver available by...

Just a couple of weeks ago, two terms, on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS), were used interchangeably -- it was truly a difference without a distinction -- but a lot has changed in a short time. First, Salesforce.com introduced Force.com, and a day later SAP announced a long awaited on-demand...

During Dreamforce there was a panel discussion for media and the financial and industry analysts. Some of Salesforce.com's senior executives were there for a panel discussion, which included Chief Financial Officer Steve Cakebread, cofounder and Executive Vice President Parker Harris and Vice Presi...

I saw Marc Benioff in New York just after Labor Day. He was in town for various business reasons and hosted a dinner for a group of customers, analysts and journalists. It was a very interesting group though also informal -- there were no speeches or presentations and no need to drag out the safe h...

My last few columns have been focused on new technologies that are making their way into the broader CRM suite. Expanding the CRM suite has never been easier, as platform vendors like Salesforce.com provide all the capabilities necessary for innovative developers to add something to the ensemble. He...

Dave Duffield, most famously the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday, was giving a keynote presentation at the RightNow user conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., when it hit me. Duffield is about to become a kingmaker in the on-demand market. Please forgive the apparent hyperbole and continue.

Back in the bad old days, before there was much available on the Internet, there were practically no useful information available about companies, their executives and their possible business problems. If you wanted to sell to a private company, good luck. Hopefully, you went to college with someone...

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum. It's hard to believe th...

The front office computing market continues to impress me despite the fact that I have been covering it for so long. Early solutions evolved into suites that covered what we once thought were all of the niches possible, but the surprising thing is that all that coverage simply initiates many new nic...

Last week, the train officially pulled into the station; we got a call from Tranquility Base -- choose your metaphor. Salesforce.com announced availability of Summer '07 which included final delivery of the long-awaited Apex programming language -- the last piece of the developer platform. From here...

It's just a hunch, but I think that NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson will not have the same problems with the SEC regarding his IPO that Marc Benioff had a couple of years ago when he took Salesforce.com public. You might recall that Benioff was slapped with a large fine for speaking about his impending IPO...

Over the last three weeks I have received an intensive course in what it means to be The Customer, and I really liked it. During that time -- not to mention the preceding six months -- my wife and I have been trying to get our kitchen remodeled. In our journey we have dealt with a broad range of co...

Ten years ago Joe Pine defined customer experience in "The Experience Economy" and as is typical for big ideas, it took several years for it to ferment and bubble up to the mainstream. During that time, it's been amazing to see how we've turned customer experience into something different from what ...

On my way out of Fenway Park the other night, I found a credit card on the sidewalk -- an American Express platinum card to be specific. When I got to a well-lit place, I called one of the numbers on the back of the card and began my odyssey. I am not picking on Amex and I have been a member of Amex...

Earlier this year, we did a study of attrition in the call center. We wanted to know why even good or great call centers have such persistently high rates of attrition, especially when on-boarding new agents. On-boarding is the process that starts with hiring and continues through training and the i...

It's hard to avoid comparisons between Microsoft and Salesforce.com this week. While many see a zero sum game being played out in which Google plus Salesforce.com somehow equals a diminished Microsoft, I think there's more. In each case, we see major technology companies building elegant products fo...

The other day a reader sent me an interesting e-mail that I think sums up what a lot of other people are thinking. The note reads, in part, "We've all read the same books, we all know who Clay Christensen is and none of this surprises us. So why are the big players letting themselves go down the sam...

Paul Greenberg has one of the most prolific and wide-ranging minds in the CRM business. He wrote the CRM bible, CRM at the Speed of Light, which is now in its third edition. Greenberg is also an incredible gadget-head. He has all of the toys you can imagine -- phones, game consoles, entertainment ...

A miracle year comes along very rarely, though any single year could be one depending on the subject matter. For example, as a member of Red Sox nation, 2004 will always be a miracle year for me, because my team won the World Series after 86 years of futility -- the Cubs are still waiting for their...