Previewing Dreamforce

People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce and Dreamforce.  My standard answer is, how would I know?  I get briefings like a lot of analysts but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements.  This is not new [...]

Benioff’s Vision

One of the more revealing things I heard from Marc Benioff at Cloudforce 2011 in New York last week was his idea about how his company will continue to build out its product line.  Marc’s never been super secretive about his general direction though product specifics have always been closely kept.  But in our conversation, [...]

The Case for Massive Collaboration

Sometimes I feel like we’re stuck in the weeds with Social CRM.  Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL! No, really.  Sometimes I feel like we’re missing the bigger point of social CRM because we’re spending so many brain cells focusing on the technology and not so much on what it [...]

Intellectual property in the front office

One of the fun things about being an analyst in a market where there is as much innovation as you can find in CRM is that it’s all so unpredictable and surprising.  As I was researching social media in the context of Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud recently, it struck me that something very [...]

What is Cloud Computing? (v. 2010)

What exactly is Cloud Computing?  The question just doesn’t go away and as the year starts SugarCRM has just released a white paper — “The Sugar Open Cloud” —offering its definition and its argument for why its vision is superior.  I am not sure about either. Full disclosure: I like SugarCRM and have a lot [...]

IP, an unintended consequence of Cloud Computing

I was talking to Jason Lemkin, CEO of EchoSign the other day when something he said gave me an idea.  EchoSign is a cool bit of SaaSware that manages the document signing process across the Web eliminating the need for sending copies of contracts overnight to complete deals. There is a niche for this because [...]

Customer experience or service product?

There is a difference between a customer experience and a service product and it is worth noting the distinction.  We seem to obsess about the former and almost ignore the latter and that’s too bad because I think there is money to be made in the difference. The distinction reminds me of the big discussion [...]

Oracle and Salesforce duke it out in service

Market analysis firm IDC figures the market for service and support software will reach $4.2 billion before the end of the first Obama administration.  That’s reason enough for software vendors to want to be all over the market like a cheap suit, like white on rice, like a junkyard dog.  But as the market moves [...]

More New Garage

Back in 2004 I wrote a white paper titled “The New Garage” which forecasted the evolution of Cloud Computing.  The ideas in the paper were derived from basic economics.  I thought that the cost of software, maintenance and service were so out of line that it was only a matter of time before the paradigm [...]

Twelve quarters

A couple of weeks ago at Salesforce.com’s ServiceCloud announcement in New York, something Marc Benioff said stuck in my mind.  In the afternoon session for financial analysts, he spoke about management style and how his company operates as if each month was a quarter.  In other words the same discipline of selling and forecasting that [...]