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When making forecasts for a year ahead, I have always found the "greater fool" theory comforting. In short, it takes a fool to make a forecast, and a greater one to believe it ...
Based on the excellent job Denis Pombriant did on his column this week and the great columns he's delivered this year, I realized that I am truly the Accidental Analyst of CRM Buyer With that in mind, let's take a look at the predictions I made for 2006 and how I did. If this...
It's hard to believe that it's time to make predictions for the year ahead -- it feels like I just finished that job, but here we are again. I dug up my 2006 predictions and was amazed at how close some of them were. The lesson I derive here is that I must not have been trying hard enough ...
Salesforce.com is having a good year this quarter. That's not a typo -- the company seems to be announcing a year's worth of new products in a very short time, though delivery for some of the announcements might stretch out to this time next year ...
I have always advocated that CRM is a growing field, and that it grows at the margins whenever some innovative company introduces a new application type. As such, the definition really speaks more about all of the front office than CRM alone. Nevertheless, over the last few years we've seen a lot of new applications in sales, marketing and service that fit this description...
Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language ...
"It's another arrow in the quiver that Salesforce.com users now have to bring together their on-demand CRM app with their legacy applications and those applications that reside behind the firewall," Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "There are a var...
You have to take your hat off to Salesforce.com, I think. Last week's earnings call was a thing of beauty. It was the kind of thing that I bet every entrepreneur must dream of doing someday -- reporting to the investors on a great quarter for their newly public company ...
One of the benefits from the explosion of sales effectiveness solutions has been the effect on the marketing process. For too long, selling was regarded as a pseudo science while marketing was regarded as an art that needed to be tightly controlled to prevent waste. So it was no surprise to hear discussions of marketing ROI or to see marketing automation defined as a product set that had a lot in common with accounting...
I have been very encouraged by the flurry of activity in the sales effectiveness space. Over the last 18 months or so, emerging vendors there have taken a concept that had been around for a while and breathed new life into it ...
I got a call from a friend the other day lamenting the loss of technical IT jobs to lower cost economies. I know this is a charged subject, but I thought I would wade into it to explore what it means for CRM ...
You have to give credit where it is due, and today that means kudos to Oracle. More than 40,000 customers, analysts, press and others have converged this week in San Francisco for Oracle Open World (OOW), the annual user conference. It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco represent only a small portion of the people all over the planet who know the company's products and use them in mission-critical business processes every day. More than that, it is a tribute to one man's vision of what information technology needed to become that started more than 30 years ago...
More-advanced applications are taking entirely new approaches to the sales process, generally byincorporating intelligence into the application, Denis Pombriant, principal of Beagle Research, tells CRM Buyer "Most of the improvements I have been tracking in SFA applications ar...
I keep thinking about the idea of this incubator that Salesforce.com is launching. As you know, I am a student of inflection points and I think the incubator potentially represents a very big one ...
There are so many things that I could write about Dreamforce that I have had to quickly conclude that it won't all fit into one column, and I will be writing about it for some time to come. I bet I am not alone. Here are some ideas that I thought were important, however ...
A lot of people will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for Salesforce.com's annual user meeting, Dreamforce. I think I have been to every one of these events and this year marks a turning point. Previous meetings have been held in local hotels and other venues around the city but this year there is no denying it, the event is big enough to occupy at least a part of the city's biggest hall...
I was having a discussion the other day with a client about changes in the software industry. We got to talking about different trends when the subject turned to the current tendency of discussing business software in terms of the size of the company that uses it. "Enterprise" software has certainly gotten a lot of play, though the "SMB" and "mid-market" descriptors have also been well aired out, and, in aggregate, those two groups might outspend the enterprise today...
Someone recently asked me who I thought was ahead in the on-demand market. That's a hard one. As far as I am concerned, there are no right answers to a question like that, and though seemingly innocuous, it raises more questions than I can answer ...
I spent part of last week at a user group meeting high in the Rockies, theRightNow Summit. The term "summit" is not only figurative -- it's literal. The company is headquartered in Bozeman, Mont., another high spot on the continent, and it seems to select meeting locations near the tree line to burnish its western image. At that altitude, it's sometimes hard to breathe, which produces a perfect environment for being sedentary and listening to new ideas. In retrospect, it might have been a perfect setting...
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the on-demand call center, and about how the new technology model is driving business model change. With so much happening in the call center, you might be led to believe that being a call center agent is the best job in the world. Well, maybe not the best job, I have that, but you get my meaning ...
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