The Next Ten Years

A door closed this quarter and another opened.  We’re now oriented on a new computing paradigm that will serve us for the rest of the decade.  There is now broad agreement on the big IT issues of our time and they can be summarized in the Four Big Buzzwords mobile, social, big data (and analytics) [...]

Transportation, Sustainability and CRM

Sustainability and CRM There was an interesting article in the New York Times last week, “When Flying 720 Miles Takes 12 Hours”   about airlines but the subtext was all about CRM, or at least where CRM has to go.  If you know me at all, you know I closely attend to macroeconomics and energy [...]

Notes from Convergence 2012

Note to self: Write something nice about Microsoft Convergence 2012.  They did a great job in Houston and most importantly you can really see the CRM focus coming together with social, mobile, analytics, back office and a lot more.  It’s taken a long time because there are a lot of moving parts for Microsoft but [...]

Salesforce, the Enterprise Vendor

Salesforce held its winter Cloudforce meeting in San Francisco last week.  For many the meeting seemed like a reiteration of Dreamforce and to be fair there was some overlap but each time they tell the story, the company adds new wrinkles that cause people like me to pay attention. What caught the attention of many [...]

It’s ASP All Over Again

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the infrastructure as a service space.  Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it cost [...]

The Empire Comes Back

One of the more noticeable efforts by Meg Whitman since she became HP’s president and CEO last September has been the company’s effort in cloud computing.  Last week the company announced  that within two months it will begin offering cloud services.  Moreover, HP has taken the important stance of trying to be different from the [...]

Getting the Skinny on the Big Four

On an otherwise slow news week there was a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia that I found interesting on Business Insider. The headline told the story, as good headlines often do.  “What Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP Don’t Tell Customers” identifies, in Gaughan’s opinion, the [...]

Gates, Jobs and Tinkering

Malcolm Gladwell published an illuminating article on the late Steve Jobs in this week’s New Yorker and I recommend it highly.  If you are looking for something that delves into the dirty laundry of Job’s tempestuous personality there’s some of that but it’s hardly the focus of the piece.  Nevertheless, Gladwell, with a knack for [...]

Convergence #1

It’s show time!  Or maybe more correctly it’s show season.  Last week we had SugarCon, Radian6 and Salesforce’ Cloudforce Paris.  I didn’t go to all of them — Partis could have been fun.  It was a short trip and many Salesforce execs were in Boston later in the week for Radian6. This week I have [...]

Salesforce Radian6 Deal Analysis

Salesforce had a busy week first buying Radian6 for a king’s ransom ($326 large) and then announcing a partnership with Intuit to resell its CRM pre-integrated with QuickBooks.  As I write this there is at least one more interesting announcement in the wings but I am under NDA and not sure when that announcement will [...]