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I spoke with a group of investors last week about the importance of the emerging field of platform technology. They were interested in investing in a company that was looking for additional late round funding and they wanted to know a few things. What is the market for this new technology? Who wi...

In its short life, Salesforce.com has garnered more than its fair share of publicity, thanks in no small measure to the activities of its founder, CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff. Benioff may be the 21st century high technology answer to P.T. Barnum, a colorful figure in an industry that has more sh...

I have been wracking my brain for an adequate metaphor to describe the situation that has developed in the CRM world and in enterprise software in general. It started about two years ago when Larry Ellison of Oracle looked at the enterprise software market and decided that SAP could conquer the wor...

It was no surprise that IBM and SAP joined ranks to promote SAP's on-demand CRM product a day after the Oracle-Siebel deal concluded. It's very clear that the consulting, database and applications powerhouses have a common interest in opposing the California based Axis of CRM represented by Oracle-S...

Google has been in the news a lot lately and not for the kinds of things that the financiers on Wall Street like to see. Last week it was revealed that Google, alone among major search engine companies, is resisting a government request to provide a representative sample of searches to help Washing...

Have you noticed the "dial 'O' for a human" movement gathering steam? One related manifestation is the clever set of ads put out by Citibank for its credit cards. You may have seen the ads showing a man calling for service and navigating through the tragedy that is the automated call response syst...

For the last two years, I have been talking and writing about the importance of a new kind of on-demand application platform that would enable users to have instant access to best-of-breed software that would integrate with whatever else they were using. Essentially, I have been talking about what ...

It's that time of year again when we announce who the WizKids are. Confused? It's our annual award to emerging companies and companies with emerging innovations. When you get right down to it, we track new and cool stuff and report on it. Two years ago, we started the process with a simple questi...

A few weeks ago, I started writing about what I see as the post-CRM world. I think it is becoming clear that front-office automation is moving past the definition of CRM that we have become accustomed to. As I look around the industry, there is a perceptible difference between what software is and...

In lots of examples like PCs, databases, and even CRM, a concept is so new (a discontinuous innovation) that there is nothing like it, which means there is no true analog to replace. The idea of replacement is fundamental because the innovation can't take over another niche. Effective use of the i...

I think 2005 was a bit of a false spring for many software companies. Although many enterprises moved to take advantage of new revenue opportunities, those actions did not filter down to emerging companies with the ideas and technologies the big guys need to achieve their vision. In fact, articles...

Ever notice how these year end reviews and a pundit's previous forward-looking prognostications rarely synch up? Of course not! Analysts and pundits are great at predicting the future, but lousy at coming back a year later to review how they did. Well, I'm different. I don't care if I was wrong ...

It really should not surprise me, though it does, that the media companies have such lousy Web sites. Here's what surprises me: It's a secret hidden in plain sight that the newspaper business is in trouble, yet papers seem to be supremely ineffective at doing something about the situation. Sellin...

It's time to start thinking about what comes after CRM. I am not trying to be alarmist or to set a dire tone, I just think there's a good amount of evidence that CRM has taken us as far as it's going to and we need to think about something beyond it. That's not to say that CRM is dead -- far from i...

For some companies, CRM means managing each transaction and checking the customer's satisfaction at the end. This is exactly why a company's customer loyalty scores are always lower than the satisfaction score. CRM is a lot more than buying a lot of products and services from a software company. ...

I have a wallet that is much thicker than it needs to be because it is full of supermarket loyalty cards. Each store has its own loyalty card and I dutifully carry all of them as well as the membership card I pay for annually at one of the warehouse stores. I actually like the warehouse store best...

Last week, Microsoft announced its embrace of the Web and software as a service (SaaS) but there might be less there than meets the eye. Rather than a bold strategy to move the company and the industry ahead, I see it as more of a hedging strategy to help the company hold on. Microsoft Founder and ...

When it comes to CEM I think we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I can fully buy into the idea and the importance of treating the customer well and being attentive to the signals a customer gives off by virtue of his or her existence and background. But most CEM "solutions" that ...

If you came to Boston last week for Siebel's User Week conference you might have been disappointed. With the impending purchase of the company by Oracle, it would have been easy to regard the event as some kind of "last hurrah" -- and what better place than Boston for the atmospherics to pull it of...

Last week in New York, Salesforce.com improved its position in the CRM suite market when it introduced version 2.0 of its service and support offering. The company has quickly come up the curve to a point where it has approximate parity with other companies offering a range of support options inclu...