Kudos for Zuora

On demand billing and payments company, Zuora, has been named the OnDemand 100 Company of the Year by AlwaysOn, a Silicon Valley web property that tracks activities in emerging companies. As you know if you’ve been here before, Zuora was one of the earliest movers in the market for on demand billing services for companies [...]

Economics On The Ground in Silicon Valley

The economy appears to be on the minds of magazine editors these days and no wonder.  With the stimulus running out the economy appears to be headed south again.  This contradicts my experience last week in Silicon Valley where the CEOs I met with said they were, 1)   Raising more money, not because they need [...]

Oracle Buries the Lead

At his second and final keynote address to the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld user meeting, Larry Ellison finally gave the rabid software oriented audience something to savor. Throughout the week the Oracle CEO and his minions had spent large amounts of time telling us about hardware or some other aspect of the business leaving me and [...]

Larry and Marc Round 2 or Is It Round 3? #OOW11

Ahh, what a difference a good night’s sleep makes.  The Greeks are still threatening default on their bonds, the economy is still in the loo, the major stock indices are teetering on a bear market precipice and Marc Benioff is still going to speak at Oracle OpenWorld or at least next door.  But there is [...]

Dreamforce as a Developers’ Paradise

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t paradise but then again with all the new tools Salesforce is rolling out for multiple kinds of computing whose primary overlap is the significance of the Internet is their use, this was kind of a Bonanza — Little Joe! Get my compiler!  (Sometimes I crack myself up.)  At any rate, [...]

Carbon Survey Calls Salesforce Leader in Carbon Abatement

Marc Benioff’s Facebook page says that Salesforce.com is a rising leader in the effort to get carbon out of business.  I didn’t know there was such a survey or report but I am glad there is. Getting carbon out of your business processes is hugely important.  While most people will view this as an anti-pollution [...]

Is Collaboration Worth It? Yup!

Someone recently asked me why collaboration is important in the enterprise.  To be specific, they were asking about the kind of collaboration that products like Yammer and Chatter enable.  This collaboration consists of enabling people to share thoughts, ideas and micro news bits in a social context without the usual institutional overhead of email or [...]

Beagle Research Group Recognizes Video Pioneers

Announces first annual Short Tale Award™ for Excellence in Video Use Stoughton, MA, February 8, 2011 — Beagle Research Group, today announced “The Beagle Short Tale Awards” for 2011.  Beagle gives the annual awards for various aspects of video production and use by front office software companies in sales, marketing, service and education.  Denis Pombriant, [...]

Salesforce AppQuest $100,000 Prize Winner is BranchIt

In the lead up to Dreamforce, Salesforce ran a competition with a $100,000 prize for the best new application developed for the Force.com platform.  The five finalists were introduced at Dreamforce and the winner was BranchIt, a startup that built an application that adds what it calls a LinkedIn effect to Salesforce’s Chatter. According to [...]

Dreamforce Day One

It’s sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) days and founding Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vibe [...]