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The Internet has a long and storied history of democratizing information and influencing social change. It has flattened hierarchies and made information accessible to many more people -- though, ironically, it also has sometimes assaulted democracy in the process. Just think about how philanthropy has been changing at the instigation of Salesforce, one of the Internet's poster kids...

Salesforce on Monday announced a definitive agreement to acquire the marketing analytics company Datorama ...

So far, the looming trade war is limited to actions and reactions related to durable things that trade throughout the global economy -- cars, steel and aluminum, for instance. Will that remain the battleground? Or should we expect greater contentiousness around services -- specifically, Software as a Service, and CRM in particular? ...

The close of the second quarter ends the first wave of vendor customer events. Still to come this fall are Salesforce Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld -- and others -- but mercifully, we have the summer to digest all the information absorbed this spring and re-sync with our native time zones ...

Significant Q4 wins and earnings numbers reflect the strength of Oracle's resurgence as a cloud company. At its earnings call earlier this week, CEO Mark Hurd mentioned some big names -- including Johnson & Johnson, the Cleveland Clinic, Baylor University and AT&T -- that made significant commitments to Oracle in the quarter. ...

Although Oracle was one of the last major enterprise software vendors to initiate a move to the cloud, it has embraced the idea of creative destruction in breathtaking ways. With BYOL -- Bring Your Own License -- the company has inspired a movement of its traditional software customers to its infrastructure cloud. ...

A good way to understand what Salesforce articulated at Connections 2018 is to recall the direction it set a few years ago, when CEO Marc Benioff said the company would develop most apps for the small screen first. Translated, that was a concession that handheld devices -- phones and tablets -- would become the primary devices we'd all use in business. Lots of software vendors took the same position, though arguably few did it as fast...

Zuora recently held its annual Subscribed user conference in San Francisco. In general, it was a good first outing since the company's IPO, coming off some impressive first-quarter results. Year-over-year subscription revenues grew 39 percent and total revenue grew an amazing 60 percent, for example ...

Decades after computers were supposed to end paper-based business, we're still at it, using documents to send and receive information and act as proxies in business processes. It's hard to say if paper consumption slowed thanks to digitization, because good historical use statistics are hard to find. However, it doesn't really matter, because business is drowning in paper -- and, more importantly, the expenses associated with it...

"Caught short by Salesforce, SAP targets 'front office' market" is more revealing than SAP might like but the headline on Reuters' story is appropriate to the announcements coming out of SAP's annual customer confab in Orlando, Florida. It describes SAP's new attempt to consolidate a group of about a dozen front office apps into a fully integrated customer relationship management suite -- next year...

Oracle has been on a security campaign ever since Larry Ellison openly began discussing the new "autonomous database" -- so called because it can manage itself, including self-patching and upgrading, without human effort. ...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described Facebook as the "new cigarettes" in a recent appearance on the television show CBS This Morning and called for the U.S. to adopt a national privacy law like the GDPR, which just went into effect in Europe. ...

It was once common knowledge that Apttus was the next big acquisition target on Salesforce's radar, until Salesforce decided to acquire another CPQ (configure, price, quote) vendor to augment its Sales Cloud. In the two-ish years since, Apttus has nicely pivoted, diversifying its partner base and justifying its existence with a new strategy and nomenclature around what it calls the "middle office." I was present at Accelerate, the company's annual user conference, last week in San Francisco...

Oracle -- or could we say "Autoracle"? -- has introduced more autonomous products, generally in keeping with what I see as a build-out of an information utility. ...

For some time, it has been my impression that in the CRM market, all -- or at least most -- of the good ideas have been taken. It's been a long time since we've seen a new systemic approach to front-office business. It's even been a long time since we've seen a major innovation at the department level. ...

There is a meme making the rounds and I have no idea how old it is or its origins but I've heard it twice in the last week. It's easier to start a company than it is to scale one. You can't say it's a revolutionary thought, but for the last 20 years the emphasis has been decidedly on founding, so this is something of a departure ...

By now you're likely familiar with the rough outlines of the story. After nearly a decade of company building, Zuora last week went public, valuing itself on the open market at roughly US$2 billion after gaining 43 percent on its first day of trading. Those outlines don't reveal the importance of Zuora generally, and subscription billing systems in particular, to the rapid evolution of the subscription economy and CRM...

We should start discussing what's beyond CRM. ...

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfesson, who teach at MIT's Sloan School of Management, started writing about the impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning almost a decade ago. Their early books -- The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy -- provided deep insights into the way the era we live in would unfold.

Sales people and their managers should be celebrating the economic gains of the last few years but for many of them the gains may be illusory. ...