Archive

I worked on an exercise in messaging for a CRM vendor this week, and it was both entertaining and frustrating at times. It was entertaining to hear smart people offer clever takes on what they do (and, perhaps more colorfully, what their competition does), but it was frustrating to realize that the ...

Of the nearly 6 million people who consider home their primary place of work, 2.8 million -- slightly more than 2 percent of the population -- are employed by someone else, not "self-employed," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When accounting for those working at least one day from home, the Te...

It's worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce -- the products announced -- as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist, and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters. Many people might look at the news coming out of Sa...

The project management office has provided well-documented value to many organizations. However, for some businesses, the benefits never materialize. Take a look at PMOs over the years, and you will see that many have restructured, dissolved, or constantly had to justify their existence during both ...

The idea of taking CRM into the field has been around for a decade -- long enough to lull many people into ignoring it in favor of newer, flashier and more social ideas. But this isn't the time to take your eye off mobile CRM. The technology is about to emerge as a force that will boost adoption, in...

SAP won a battle in its war with Oracle Thursday when a judge overturned the $1.3 billion sum SAP was previously ordered to pay Oracle in a copyright infringement suit. The dispute regarded SAP's TomorrowNow software maintenance unit, which was accused of skirting licensing fees by downloading hundr...

Shortly before Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference kicked off this year, with its accompanying slew of new offers and products, Microsoft Dynamics CRM played a little offense: The company rolled out a "Cloud CRM for Less" offer, which grants $150 in cash per user seat to any customer that switche...

One of the announcements Marc Benioff made in his Day 1 keynote here at Dreamforce was Database.com. The news is that Salesforce is now enabling its customers to store their data on their own hardware inside their data centers. There is a need -- or at least a demand -- for this capability, as man...

Dreamforce's two-and-a-half hour keynote on Wednesday featured plenty of technology talk, and technology is neat -- don't get me wrong. The art and science of managing customer relationships would be lost without it. But one thing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said early on really stuck in my head. He...

Salesforce.com kicked off its 9th Dreamforce conference with a slew of new features, services and products, as well as an offering that represents a surprising shift for the cloud-evangelizing company: the ability to store data on premises for security-conscious companies. Although lost somewhat ami...

Salesforce.com is riding the crest of wave after wave of good news as it starts Dreamforce, its annual convocation for customers, prospects, the press and analyst communities. Forty thousand people are expected in San Francisco for the event at some point in the week. In a sign of how big this eve...

There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce. For some reason, I don't understand why Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year, which is fortunate for two reasons: Hurricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the East Coast ov...

Salesforce.com has been front and center the past couple of weeks, revving up for its Dreamforce '11 cloud computing industry event, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is expected to draw more than 40,000 registered attendees and showcase 1,000 solutions ...

SAS is beefing up its SAS Social Media Analytics application with new features that give users a better handle on their social media effectiveness: improved tracking of past versus present performance, and benchmarks to assess competitors' performance. "A lot of this functionality seems as though it...

As is so sadly the case with many environment-oriented subjects, Green IT was consigned to the back burner at a lot of businesses when the economy began grinding its gears several years ago. The same thing happened to a lesser extent to some potentially game-changing CRM strategies, most notably mob...