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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. ...

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.

We've become obsessed with big data and analyzing it, though sometimes I think we get in our own way. The issue is that we preferentially collect quantitative data as if it were the only thing worth the time. In fact, quantitative data is but one kind of data, and the information it provides gives a one-dimensional view of the world. It's not wrong information -- just incomplete.

An opinion piece published this week in The New York Times gets something exactly wrong. In "Facebook Shouldn't Fact-Check," Jessica Lessin argues that it's not Facebook's job to fact-check the growing flood of fake news coming at us through its portal and social media more generally. She does have a point, but I think she doesn't take things far enough...

Oracle recently announced a new connection between its Service and IoT clouds. That makes total sense to me. I bet a lot of folks think of the Internet of Things as those machines that do things directed by algorithms -- and if so, they might wonder why they need to be connected to customer service, such an obviously human channel. It's not off base, however...

Since its founding in 2007, Zuora has been the champion of the subscription economy, as a differentiator for companies that sell products as services and have to bill and collect monthly rather than engaging in a single one-time transaction. ...

It's been a rough couple of months, and we should talk about something fun and not political, but CRM-centric. I know! Let's ask how the election influenced CRM. Seriously, there's a nugget in there that ought to get us all thinking about business and keep our minds off that other stuff. Come on, it'll be fun ...

I've been writing about customer loyalty a lot -- and not just to sell my book, though you can buy it any time you want. Seriously, though, markets everywhere are cooling. They once were ripe with new categories and products, but everybody now seems to have the new stuff, and growth is falling back to the baseline of organic growth. ...

"This looks like conventional partner relationship management on some recreational drug, which is a good thing," said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research The PRM space has been fragmented for a long time because "devising a general purpose facility for multiple types...