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SuiteWorld Reveals Cloud ERP's Moment in the Sun May 22, 2013 
NetSuite bloomed this week, in part because of a very well-produced user meeting, SuiteWorld, held in San Jose. However, it also bloomed because there can no longer be any doubt that the market for ERP technology is turning to the cloud. What was once unthinkable -- that ERP could or would ever be delivered as a cloud solution -- has been gaining acceptance
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Sorry, the CRM Niche Is Full at the Moment May 15, 2013 
There are two questions that emerging companies in the CRM space hear when they face the analysts: When are you going public? Why don't you build out a full CRM capability? The first question is easily and deftly handled by most executives, and it must be. An IPO has its own cadence, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is very keen to protect its turf.
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Economics Imitates Life, and Life Has a Lot to Do With CRM May 08, 2013 
It's been wonderful this spring, being a part of all the vendor briefings now in high gear. That's because in short but sometimes painfully dense bursts, we get to know what each vendor has in store for the months ahead. It's a lot and that's a good sign. There seems to be a breakout happening. One of the themes running through all the events -- like a kid on a tricycle -- is marketing
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The Ethics of Selling the Old vs. the New May 01, 2013 
It hit me last week while attending Oracle's Analyst World briefing. We met in a conference center on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores to learn about the company's latest developments in hardware and software, and to be briefed on its future road map. How extensive was it? Let's just say that my brain hurt when it was over, and I had to sign a five-year NDA agreement to get out of the building.
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How to Ride the New Analytics Wave April 24, 2013 
I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me. I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "what's valuable in this pile?" to "how can we slice and dice this raw material," everybody wants a piece of the action.
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Doubling Down on Data April 17, 2013 
About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. I believed that for two reasons. First, I believed social media was inevitable, though I had no idea what form it would take. Facebook was not on my radar and had not officially launched, MySpace was something for kids, and Twitter had definitely not been invented yet.
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SugarCon 2013: New Direction, Old Message April 10, 2013 
Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America. It seems to have worked, because even though New York is one of the most cosmopolitan of cities, I heard a lot of European languages in the corridors, and I met many people from countries across the Pacific.
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What's Driving Marketing's Renaissance? April 08, 2013 
Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a lot of emphasis on marketing.
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Race Against the Machine April 03, 2013 
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, is short and to the point.
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Convergence Tales March 27, 2013 
For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision. The last step has been getting new enterprise products into the hands of users.
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2 Steps Back: The Social Revolution March 20, 2013 
We have this idea of modern computing that is closely tied to social media, and rightly so. Social media is a kind of glue that ties us together in new and bigger configurations than our own human capabilities. However, it is also the unspoken issue in the Yahoo brouhaha about working from home -- the idea whose name shall not be spoken. How else to explain the ultra retro edict -- anachronism, really -- that all Yahoos must report to the brick-and-mortar in person rather than "telecommute."
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Subscriptions, Social and CRM March 13, 2013 
"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.
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Let's Hear It for The Ecosystems! March 06, 2013 
Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? I mean it. The ecosystem -- and maybe not even social -- is the story of the last five years. While many of us have been talking up social, the ecosystems have been adding immeasurably to the customer experience.
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Benioff's Social Proof February 28, 2013 
Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which can accommodate the maintenance facilities for a squadron of F18s.
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Sage Made a Wise Decision February 20, 2013 
I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market.
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Big Data for Marketing February 13, 2013 
The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. Sales and service evolved organically, making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available.
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Rethinking the Service Paradigm February 06, 2013 
I just got off a phone briefing with Freshdesk, an Indian company with a subscription customer service and support system that it refers to as a "help desk." Freshdesk's got most of the bells and whistles you might expect to find in a solution like that, and it has gamified the business processes as well. That's what inspired this column.
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Wall St. Leaves Money on Table for Subscription Companies January 30, 2013 
Look, we know the old truism that if you don't have customers and profits you
don't have a business, you have a hobby. But could we please get a little balance
on the profit idea? Emerging companies typically don't declare profits because they use excess cash to fuel growth. Anything left over is plowed back into the business.
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Machine Learning, TDA and the Future of Invention January 23, 2013 
Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new way
to analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very large
indeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" and hearing about it has the feel of hearing about relativity for the first time and learning that space is curved.
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Sales Productivity January 16, 2013 
We are at it again -- and why not? It's the start of another year, and people are doing predictable things like having kickoffs of all sorts of things. Many companies I speak with on a regular basis are briefing me on new product launches and engaging in a sacred rite of a new year: the sales kickoff. Both of these things make me think a lot. The messaging I hear in briefings is all about sales productivity.
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