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Sage Software is having its annual Insights user meeting this week in Orlando, Fla., and I am filing this piece from there. More than 3,000 partner representatives are in attendance, which accounts for a broad array of products that include ACT!, SageCRM, SageCRM.com, and SalesLogix on the front-of...

Do we still need venture capitalists in the software industry? Sounds like a no-brainer, but the question also reflects the disruption that is taking place in enterprise software -- initiated by Salesforce.com and accelerated with its unveiling of a company incubator in San Mateo, Calif. For the re...

Well, it didn't look like a garage, that's all I can say. It was clean and freshly painted, and if you believe the stories in the press, recently exorcised to remove the ghosts of Siebel. It was Salesforce.com's incubator -- the closest thing I have found to my New Garage concept. For several years...

Last week, I got into the idea of evolution as it relates to the technology market and used Microsoft and Salesforce.com to illustrate the need to keep multiple plans percolating so that a company can take advantage of a move in the market. Evolution is an important filter through which I view the w...

Salesforce.com on Tuesday announced its latest acquisition to the world. CEO Marc Benioff said that document management is a core element of the company's platform strategy. That strategy has been rolling out in bits and pieces since the company announced its Apex platform last year. However, it ...

SAP's abrupt announcement that golden boy Shai Agassi was leaving the company last week hit like a proverbial ton of bricks. The initial announcement said all the right things about Agassi wanting to pursue other options, and board chairman Hasso Plattner made the usual remarks about still being fr...

Two things impressed me about Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release: the community portal and the influence of the IdeaExchange on the direction of the product. A lot of people point to the portal as the more significant and I suppose it is, but maybe only by a whisker. At the end of the day, each is...

There is a dandy little market share war taking place right now in the compensation management sector. Vendors are making claims to uniqueness and superiority and trashing each other in ways that we haven't seen in a few years -- and it's great sport. Compensation management is one of the hotter ar...

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...

Every disruptive innovation requires a minimum of two parties to play the game. There has to be a disruptor -- someone who does the disrupting -- as well as one or more disruptees -- the party or parties being disrupted. Identifying either party is difficult, but for different reasons. The disrupt...

Six to eight weeks. That's about what it seems to take to get an on-demand solution up and running these days. This information comes from an analysis of nine on-demand vendors that we surveyed for our annual WizKids report which will be out this week. What's good about that time interval is that ...

There have been a lot of things to write about this week. The two things that pique my interest, and that I think will have long range implications, are the emerging discussion of customer rights and Salesforce.com's latest announcements of its financial vertical focus. I don't see how the two over...

I got a lot of mail on the piece I wrote last week about retail data collection. The mail ran two to one in support, but it was still interesting to gauge the reactions of those who think the notion of collecting data like ZIP codes, drivers license numbers and the like is kosher. Let me say again ...

The not-so-pretty underside of CRM became apparent again recently with the revelation that TJX Companies, parent of more than 2,500 outlets including TJ Maxx, Marshalls and other retailers, had a break-in that may have compromised customer data. Increasingly, retailers are becoming the targets of th...

Salesforce.com issued a press release last week that by now looks rather ho-hum by its standards. The company announced that Deloitte & Touche had signed on as a systems integration partner and that got me thinking about how many things have changed, and how many have not. It wasn't that long ag...

I am still thinking about SAP's announcement last week that it would invest in a new business model to bring its new SOA mid-market products to the market place. I thought it was a significant enough announcement that I wanted to offer an opinion on it right away, which is why I did a piece last wee...

I always chafe at the saying, "The proof is in the pudding" in part because it is a truncation of a longer phrase, but mostly because it means nothing by itself. "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" is how the phrase really goes, and it is the one thing that came to mind when I heard about SA...

I had meetings last week with each of the big three on-demand CRM vendors -- Salesforce.com, RightNow and NetSuite -- and made some observations. Sometimes I get complaints from some of them when I mention more than one in an article because they like to pretend that they are unique. My grudging con...

Axel Schultze is a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. Perhaps that is not a very useful description since the valley seems to be littered with them, but Axel is, in my mind, an interesting case. His area of interest is the indirect sales channel, and he was the founder and first CEO of Bl...

It is part of the American Experience to be always searching for self-improvement, and I think that contributes to our obsession with New Year's resolutions. I have made a few of my own over the years and 2007 will be no exception. In the last few days I have witnessed this urge to plan and improv...