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NetSuite bloomed this week, in part because of a very well-produced user meeting, SuiteWorld, held in San Jose. However, it also bloomed because there can no longer be any doubt that the market for ERP technology is turning to the cloud. ...

There are two questions that emerging companies in the CRM space hear when they face the analysts: ...

It's been wonderful this spring, being a part of all the vendor briefings now in high gear. That's because in short but sometimes painfully dense bursts, we get to know what each vendor has in store for the months ahead. It's a lot and that's a good sign. There seems to be a breakout happening ...

It hit me last week while attending Oracle's Analyst World briefing. We met in a conference center on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores to learn about the company's latest developments in hardware and software, and to be briefed on its future road map. ...

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me ...

About ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM. ...

Sugar CRM took its annual customer and partner show on the road this week and brought what had been a Bay Area extravaganza to the Big Apple -- the better to attract a sizable population of customers and partners from Europe and other points beyond North America ...

Marketing is taking CRM by storm. While we've all been fixated on social media, many companies -- both vendors and end customers -- have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions ...

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Sloan School of Management have written an interesting book for our times -- our economic times -- with an appealing metaphor that any technologist will appreciate. ...

For years Microsoft has been telling us that they have great new products in the pipeline that were competitive, and an approach that was social and customer-centric. For the last couple years, however, we had to watch the slow maturation of that vision ...

We have this idea of modern computing that is closely tied to social media, and rightly so. Social media is a kind of glue that ties us together in new and bigger configurations than our own human capabilities ...

"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were as impressive as much for their brevity as for their meaning ...

Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? ...

Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. ...

I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! (Venerable ACT! if you ask me) and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market ...

The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. ...

I have been known to do things for money. I bet you have too, but doesn't it sound funny to put it that way? ...

Last week Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new wayto analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very largeindeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" (TDA) and hearing about it has the feelof hearing about relativity for the first time (or Salesforce.com) and learning thatspace is curved.

For a long time, many people have been predicting the demise of ERP, and while I share those sentiments, a demise can take many forms. The one we all understand well is the crash-and-burn variety, but that's not the only and perhaps not even the predominant approach. ...

A lot happened while you weren't looking. A stream of articles in December, especially, the week between the holidays, seemed to tie up some of 2012's loose ends and some point to significant changes in the years ahead. They also highlight the difference between hardware and software ...