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Every innovation spawns its own set of issues. What happens when you have a lot of a good thing, like cloud computing? You might get a "Franken-cloud," as some vendors are calling it. ...
Zuora two weeks ago announced its first acquisition and a new product, Z-Insights. The acquired company, Frontleaf, will form the basis of Z-Insights. This marks an important moment for both Zuora and what it has called the "subscription economy." ...
"This is a very important announcement, because it begins to bring structure to analytics and concretely demonstrates how many niches there are in the space," remarked Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Group. "It de-monolith-izes analytics," he told CRM Buyer....
There is no better company to look at to get a sense of the future of technology in business and society than Zuora. This might surprise many people, because companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce might come to mind more readily. To one degree or another, those companies feature their products and services, which are very important, but Zuora talks about business models -- and today, that's even more important.
It is subtle, but in the spring conferences I see a pattern emerging around the importance of process. Admittedly, my analysis in this case is less than scientific, and I have no statistics to support my idea, but I my instinct says a trend toward process is beginning. Two conferences that support my contention include Xactly and Zuora, both of which are taking place this week in San Francisco...
"We've been trying to find better ways to work with customers forever," said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Group. Using video in CRM "is just the next thing," he told CRM Buyer, because it's "a good way to use your most expensive asset -- your people -- effec...
Sage and Salesforce put on a lovefest on Tuesday to announce their partnership, in which Sage has developed Sage Life, a product to enable small companies to connect their customer, accounting, payroll and finance data into one system, accessible from any device, anywhere, according to the companies ...
The blogosphere lit up last week after it was disclosed on Bloomberg that Salesforce was working with unnamed bankers on a possible merger. Naturally, everyone automatically thought that Salesforce was in play, and my colleagues and I went into overdrive speculating about who the suitor might be, what the striking price would be, and whether it was a good idea to do the deal. The first two questions dominated the discussion...
"We see this kind of rumor-mongering often with Salesforce, though this current [rumor] is the most persistent," noted Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research Group. Such an acquisition does not make sense, because Salesforce "is not doing something that others couldn'...
Bill Clinton won the presidency with the mantra, "It's the economy, stupid," and I think CRM could borrow heavily from that pithy bit of logic. When in doubt, if you can check your preconceptions at the door and actually perceive the information in front of you, there's no telling what you can figure out ...
I recently praised Salesforce for having the smarts to not get into enterprise resource planning several years ago. It was a good decision, I thought, because there was no upside for them to invade such a well-established market -- better for them to focus on a blue ocean strategy in which they went after new applications. ...
Marketing continues to heat up as the next big thing in CRM. It's so big, in fact, that I can see it splintering in multiple ways to accommodate all the permutations that are suddenly possible, thanks to big data, analytics, and a determination to get beyond using marketing technology as a glorified accounting system designed to limit a business' "losses" due to marketing...
We've heard a lot lately about customer moments of truth (as in, Denis Pombriant's recent book). Charting and then understanding them from the perspective of the customer is not just a useful exercise -- it's a critical way to focus on areas where empathy is most important. W...
You can tell when the economy is doing well, because instead of worrying about how you're going to make the next mortgage payment, you worry about the next disruption in business. It looks like the big worry on the horizon now is the digital disruption, a nice piece of alliteration designed to make you question your worth ...
It came as a surprise when Keith Block, vice chairman of Salesforce, made an off-the-cuff remark about a Sage-Salesforce alliance at the Salesforce World Tour event held last week in Boston. Sage and Salesforce in February had announced they would work together, with Sage moving some of its undisclosed ERP applications to the Salesforce Cloud. However, the word didn't seem to spread, and it remained off my radar for nearly two months.
Solve for the Customer: Using Customer Science to Build Stronger Relationships and Improve Business ResultsBy Denis PombriantCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform March 5, 2015, 190 pp.$14.99 Paperback We all know customers have changed. They can voice their dissatisfaction with you, complete most of the buyer's journey without you, and even seek out support and service without you...
Oracle did some smart things at last week's Oracle Modern CX Conference and user meeting in Las Vegas. The company has been making strides in organizing its messaging and products around customer experience in the wake of its RightNow Technologies acquisition a few years ago. It's been taking on the CX mantra whole hog ...
However, Oracle has most of the world's big companies as customers, noted Denis Pombriant, principal of the Beagle Research Group. "These businesses don't want solutions that have an appearance of being bleeding edge -- they want stuff that works," he told CRM Buyer....
It takes prodigious amounts of cash to launch a company these days and that's especially true when trying to insert a new idea into the collective consciousness. Salesforce spent well over US$100 million to convince us that SaaS CRM was real, Zuora has raised nearly twice that amount defining the subscription economy, and cloud ERP is following suit...
Self-service is generally considered a good thing, especially in CRM, where there has been significant investment in empowering people to take on more responsibility for provisioning service or making purchases. But it's not all great and there is some interesting blowback that is causing vendors to reconsider how their offerings work ...
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