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As markets mature, they trend toward oligopoly or even outright monopoly. There isn't much difference, because an oligopoly has several members instead of just one. Examples include electric power generation, an oligopoly made up of vertically integrated monopolies in most areas, and the airline industry -- an oligopoly made up of many airlines that may have monopolies in regional hubs. As monopolies and oligopolies gain strength, it becomes increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter a market...
People at Oracle must sometimes feel like they're living in Mark Twain's reality. After hearing that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal, Twain published a quip for the ages when he wrote, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." ...
With less than a week to go, Dreamforce continues to bear down on the world like a hurricane slowly approaching from across the ocean -- in a good way, if that makes any sense. Salesforce has pumped new products into the market that will serve as the focus of at least part of the discussion in San Francisco. Also, CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff recently decided to buy Time magazine, one of journalism's 20th century icons...
More often than you might think, disruptive innovations travel in pairs -- at least until they are separated by the markets, which decide one is useful and the other not so much. Sometimes they're symbiotic. Both may be useful or even necessary -- like hardware and software -- but that's not always the case ...
At the last Dreamforce, Salesforce introduced a new cloud dedicated to philanthropy, and the company began delivering on a three-part strategy this year. The Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud is a product of what used to be called the "Salesforce Foundation" but now is referred to as "Salesforce.org." ...
The Salesforce people whom I speak with are all heads down and breathing hard in the big push to Dreamforce. In other words, things are normal for this part of the cycle ...
There's an emerging theme in sales and marketing that I expect will be important for a while and could influence some of the messaging associated with upcoming events like Salesforce's Dreamforce and Oracle's OpenWorld. ...
"We're just ending a period in which we'd seemingly run out of ways to improve the salesperson's ability to get into a deal so that they could act in a consultative manner instead of having to compete on price," noted Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. "That's wha...
No one at Oracle will ever be nominated for sainthood, and that's probably OK with them. Over the years the company has developed a bad boy image that in some cases is richly deserved, while in others it has been embellished by events ...
The City of Sunrise Firefighters' Pension Fund recently filed a lawsuit alleging that Oracle executives lied about the company's successes in the cloud and engaged in coercion and threats to sell its cloud products, "creating an unsustainable model that fell apart." ...
SugarCRM has agreed to acquisition by Accel-KKR, a leading technology-focused private equity firm. Although Wednesday's announcement calls the deal "a significant investment," what typically happens when private equity moves in is that venture capital moves out. ...
During the same week it was sued by irate investors over progress moving its customer base to the cloud, Oracle protested a procurement process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, according to The Washington Post. ...
A lot of people might have thought Oracle's announcement of the autonomous database at last year's OpenWorld and its subsequent release earlier this year were the whole story, but there's a lot more, and Tuesday's webcast featuring Larry Ellison was proof ...
There are many interpretations of Salesforce's elevation of Keith Block to serve as co-CEO with Marc Benioff, a decision announced Tuesday ...
"There's a strong need in the market for better lead generation," observed Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Group. "Rather than relying exclusively on conventional marketing, some vendors are turning to analytics to identify the best potential prospects," he told...
I have been writing a lot about social media becoming a utility -- in my last piece, for example -- and one friend summed up his objections very well: "Nicely written and well argued, Denis. However, the question that popped up is, will consumers be willing to pay for social media? Might charging for it cause consumers to flee?" ...
The CRM industry spent the better part of a decade building up the social aspect of CRM. Back in about 2004, I wrote a paper suggesting that capturing large quantities of customer data, analyzing it, and feeding the results to social media should be a big part of CRM's future. That was before Twitter and Facebook were in the picture, and all we really had to point to when discussing social media were LinkedIn and Plaxo...
"When CRM came along, we discovered it was actually possible to swamp the sales process with too many mediocre leads," recalled Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research "That was all about quantity," he told CRM Buyer. "At last, it seems, there's someone working on lead q...
A confusing dynamic has emerged in the software industry caused by the inexorable shift to the cloud. Even before you can get into the analysis, though, you need to identify which cloud(s) you're thinking about -- e.g., infrastructure, apps, platform ...
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