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Watching Oracle's cloud strategy roll out has been interesting, to say the least, and it's given me renewed respect for its approach to the market. As a company that has been public for a long stretch of time, Oracle has displayed all the warmth of an anaconda. (I have friends there, and they are not anacondas, but I hope they know what I mean.) ...

"They have some good and credible enterprise customers," noted Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Group "They're moving upstream," he told CRM Buyer.

It's mud season here in New England -- that time of year when everything merges into an amorphous mess. The gray sky merges with a gray landscape made into slop by continual rains and dirty gray melting snow. It's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. Eventually the sun comes out and dries everything, the sky becomes distinct from the horizon, plants bloom from the firming ground, and order is restored. What better time for Amazon and Salesforce to announce another partnership?...

We've seen a parade of technologies coming into the front office since 2000, including browser-based cloud computing, social media, mobile technology, workflow, journey mapping, and big data and analytics. It's typical that at first there's only a tenuous relationship between the technology and CRM's original mission, but over a short time innovators adopt and commercialize the innovation -- often by rethinking or inventing from whole cloth business processes that leverage the technology's attributes.

"You want to make sure that orders are correct and delivered on time -- that stuff that's supposed to be hot is hot, and stuff that's supposed to be cold is cold," Beagle Research Principal Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer The mobile-ordering functionality likely will contribute...

There's a big difference between B2C and B2B analytics that no vendors seem to be addressing, and it involves the consumption model. I recently spoke with K.V. Rao, founder and chief strategy officer of Aviso, an analytics company focused on sales, and his unabashed opinion is that "if you're trying to expose insights and make things consumable, you have to address workflow." ...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff invited a select group of press, analysts and customers to a fiscal year kickoff presentation overlooking San Francisco and environs. It was held on the 23rd floor of one building that the company monopolizes, just across Mission Street from another that it is building and the bay beyond. It's a nice view ...

IBM has positioned the partnership as heralding "the era of cognitive intelligence -- using Watson's huge data store to give general information to other apps, and intelligence from specific tools like Einstein," observed Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. Meanwhi...

For an article that lands on the social marketer like a proverbial ton of bricks, check out "What's the Value of a Like?" in the March-April issue of the Harvard Business Review. ...

Seeking Alpha is an online outfit that offers investors good research and analysis on tech vendors, and it is especially well versed in Oracle. Its writers' expertise involves matching technologies to investment attractiveness. ...

"What Watson does is take all that information -- structured, unstructured, as well as other information from the operations center -- and put it in a cognitive system," explained Denis Kennelly, vice president of development and technology at IBM Security "There it can be use...

I got a wakeup call from reading "You Need to Manage Digital Projects for Outcomes, Not Outputs," a Harvard Business Review article by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. The headline says it all. ...

From trade shows to the presidential election, from artificial intelligence to acquisitions, Denis Pombriant's Beagle Research blog free-associates across the entire spectrum of customer relationships, customer experiences, and their impact on the business world and beyond. (Denis also makes regular contributions to CRM Buyer.)

Oracle last week announced the acquisition of Apiary, a small company that tucks into its product line and will not make much of a splash in the financial pages or possibly even in tech circles. Nonetheless, it's important strategic news ...

At OpenWorld, Oracle jumped into the artificial intelligence and machine learning space for its customer experience products (aka customer relationship management) and other applications (like human capital management) with an interesting difference -- a huge data store to help educate the algorithms that work for you. We're waiting for products to be delivered this year.

Other companies already offer CRM products tailored for banks. Both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics released their platforms for retail banking back in 2014, and "each of these larger companies has put a lot of investment into banking," noted Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research...

Oracle recently held a call for analysts to discuss its results for the last quarter, and there were multiple bright spots. It was much like a similar call 90 days previous, and together the calls drove home the conclusion that Oracle is turning into a cloud company. ...

There's an interesting article about customer service agents in the latest Harvard Business Review, authored by Matthew Dixon and associates at CEB, that I think is worth a look ...

However, chatbots "only do part of the job," remarked Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. "At some point, you'll need to involve humans to do what machines or bots still can't," he told CRM Buyer....

Traditionally in this year-end piece, I peer into my cloudy crystal ball and forecast the year ahead in CRM. Sometimes I'm close, other times not, but either way, my predictions quickly are forgotten. This year, I've decided just to say what I want rather than what realistically might happen. Since my vote has all of the authority of yesterday's news, it will follow the prognostications of years past.