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It's easy to be blinded by the obvious. It happens in business all the time. Something is right in front of you, but you attribute its effect to a different cause. I see this most typically when observing a paradigm shift -- the reason for the shift is not always the obvious causative agent. ...

Indeed, most of Zuora's total capital investment of $132.5 million so far has been spent on sales and marketing, according to Denis Pombriant, managing principal at the Beagle Research Group However, that's because sales and marketing "act much more like Capex (capital expen...

It is an old truism of economics that supply drives its own demand. While this is true, it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, a boatload of hula hoops could conceivably inspire a new generation of kids to pick up the toy, and nostalgic adults of a certain age might be compelled to see if they could still "do it," but it's just as likely that the supply would not spark much interest...

Zuora is "creating a category, but it's hard to see how big it will get," Denis Pombriant, managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, told CRM Buyer. "That depends on how they expand." What's a Zuora?...

Prognosticators love to look at Salesforce.com and imagine an impossibly tall edifice about to fall in the next stiff breeze. Maybe it could. I am not a finance guy, so what do I know? For now, though, the party continues -- and the party within the party is the one full of the doubters. What do they know? I don't think they understand the power of subscriptions...

One of the more interesting aspects of CRM Evolution, which was held in New York last week, is how many emerging companies attended and appear to be doing well. The big guys were there too -- either with booths or through attendance by senior people. You can get a false sense of the marketplace if you only attend Salesforce.com's Dreamforce, Microsoft Convergence, SAP Sapphire, or Oracle OpenWorld...

Am I making up a term? Maybe ...

I've been having so much fun lately that I may have missed something, but let me ask -- have we already reached the end of the customer experience trend? I think CX still has a lot of life in it, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment ...

One of the subtexts to the marketing automation explosion is analytics. Having a CRM system might make you wonder why marketing automation is needed at all, but the reasons boil down to analysis and improved data collection ...

Sage Summit, held in Washington, D.C., this week, was a more upbeat event than it has been over the last two years. During that interval, the company has had the thankless task of telling its customers and partners that it was making big changes and that things would be better. The news was not always welcomed for all the reasons you can imagine. ...

In a move that surprised me, at least, Amazon last week announced that it was lowering its fees for on-demand infrastructure by as much as 80 percent. Should we be rejoicing, or is this a sign that something is amiss? ...

I still see far too many examples of content confusing the ideas of data and information. Sometimes it seems a writer is simply trying to avoid being redundant when using data and information in the same sentence to mean the same thing. Of course, they are different, and the result is unnecessary confusion. ...

I think I have used this title before, but this is in a whole different context. Also, this is a short piece because I know you are likely out contributing to the leisure economy as you should be. This will be here when you get back. I couldn't help but make one more comment on the Oracle-Salesforce announcements of last week because I see them as an important watershed...

"Marketing automation is the belle of the ball these days, and any company that professes any kind of expertise is prime for the picking," Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, told CRM Buyer. "It's no surprise that Neolane was scooped up by Adobe." In ...

OK, the title's a cheap riff on the T.S. Elliot book of poems that inspired Cats. You have to start somewhere and that's as good a place as any -- but stay with me, this goes places. A big group of cats is called a "clowder." What if we could access a clowder of big data? ...

Pegasystems held PegaWorld in "PegOrlando" this week, and a good show it was. I have always wondered about the difference between CRM (social and otherwise) and BPM, or business process management, so I was happy to attend ...

I seem to be doing a lot of research and writing about Big Data and related issues this year. I am taking a lot of briefings from emerging analytics companies too, and I see it all as net good because the emphasis on data and analytics is really an emphasis on information -- and that is an economic indicator of sorts for me ...

Siebel saved my life. Not really but sort of. By the early 1990s, I had been selling software for what seemed like a lifetime and dealing with the typical frustrations of life in sales. There weren't enough leads, and there was always more work to do than you could squeeze into a day. I kept records on legal pads and file folders, and I had a Rolodex that I would never update because it was way too much work. And then there was forecasting. ...

I was recently discussing Watson -- the IBM super silicon brain that won Jeopardy! -- with a reporter writing an article. Around the same time, I was also looking into Google Glass, the wearable computer that enables people to record what they see and to see what they're recording through a teeny tiny screen mounted on a frame over their eyebrows. It's all very Buck Rogers or Dick Tracy or Special Forces -- or just so last week, depending on your worldview...

This story was originally published on March 20, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...