I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. A quick glance a couple of weeks ago...
It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in s...
A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By p...
I have been operating in tired mode continuously since the conventions, and by the time you read this, I may have gotten some serious sleep, though I doubt it because this is Dreamforce week after all. There have been too many things competing for my attention after dinner each evening, and none of...
Last week NetSuite held a user group meeting in Boston for OpenAir, a company that they had bought earlier this year. OpenAir, if you don't know, provides an application for managing professional services engagements. When integrated with NetSuite's front and back office applications, the combinati...
Not that it's a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. After Oracle OpenWorld, I made the observation that Siebel appeared to be returning to its old prominence. The introduction of new products based on W...
I have to admit that it's hard to concentrate on business with so many issues and crises swirling around lately. As if the presidential election was not enough, the financial meltdown is threatening an economic meltdown, and I am forever asking myself what this all might mean to CRM. The political ...
Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn't introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature...
In what could best be termed a photo finish, Greenplum and Aster Data Systems have both announced that they have integrated MapReduce into their massively parallel processing database engines. MapReduce, pioneered by Google for analyzing the Web, now becomes available to enterprises and service prov...
This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. In addition to the publication of new ana...
In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a $31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively li...
I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesper...
This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted ...
This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0. The whole idea of "sustainability" deserves some contemplation. Too often we see the word applied to just about anything that needs to look a little bit green...
Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom on Tuesday for $105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering. Peeling the onion and t...
Yes, communities and infrastructure can't keep up
Some projects are moving too fast
No, expansion is needed to meet demand
The pace seems about right
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Workbooks Takes On CRM Giants With Plain-English AI
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