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Now is the golden age of marketing. I was tempted to write the second golden age since history sometimes seems to repeat but I am more of the Mark Twain school of history and he believed that history did not repeat itself but that it rhymed ...

My sources tell me that Salesforce.com will be handling its major Dreamforce announcements differently this year. Rather than letting us drink from a firehose at the event, they promise to tell us much of their news beforehand so that they can spend the keynotes (I assume) drilling down into more of the substance of their announcements. ...

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names, in many cases renaming them. ...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The August doldrums were a time of clambakes and vacations. Now? Clambake, si! Vacation, no mucho!...

One example: Denis Browne, SAP's SVP of imagineering, and Tom Rodden, director ofapplications at Varian Medical Systems, demoed Personas, a new SAP GUI slated foravailability later this year. With Personas, users of Varian's X-Ray, oncology treatmentand other products can customize and simplify SAP screens, making them easier tooperate. Modifying SAP screens is hardly new, but in the past it required considerablelevels of training and effort. With Personas, anyone with the right permissions cansimply drag and drop commands into new configurations with no knowledge of ABAP,back-end systems or coding...

I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again ...

I dropped a small stone in a large pool last week, and the ripples are still spreading. In a separate post I wrote that IT is over. I was very careful to say that IT is over as a disruptive innovation and as an economic engine, but few understood what I meant, so I thought this would be a good chance to clear it all up ...

What's the world coming to? Microsoft lost money in the software business lastquarter -- the first loss in a decades-long string of positive earnings from the world'sbiggest software company. Sheesh! ...

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a vendor and its partners and supply chain, i.e. "the ecosystem." But itdoesn't stop there; it extends to the customer as well...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. ...

I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman. Next year it will be called "E2 Social" and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara, which will become known as "E2 Innovate." There's good symmetry here. I can't think of another purely social show or one focused on innovation. Most shows today are vendor-sponsored, which is good but different...

Last week I lamented how the legacy software establishment was focusing on the easy-to-sell parts of cloud computing without really providing the essence of cloud. Since then, I have been inspired by a couple of articles at Business Insider that point in a different though not opposite direction ...

Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follows a conventional triple-tell approach too -- tell them what you're going to say, say it, tell them what you said. But each time Salesforce repeats itself, the messaging gets clearer. When Oracle does it, the message only gets louder...

Salesforce.com announced it was buying Buddy Media for nearly US$700 million on Monday. In any discussion, that's a lot of money, maybe more than Salesforce has yet spent on any acquisition. What's going on? ...

I was so looking forward to getting the Facebook IPO out of the way, and then splat, like a ripe tomato in the kisser, we have to learn that the underwriters might not have shared some pre-IPO information transparently. Enough already! Bankers appear to be tone deaf to the fallout from their gross behavior. If you want an historical comparison, I think you need to go all the way back to the Renaissance and the Borgia popes. But no matter. ...

The purchase is just one of SAP's efforts to enter full force into the cloud applications business. Last week, it unveiled a roadmap for its push into the market that focuses on managing customers, suppliers, employers and financials. Focusing on that market is a smart move for the company right now, Denis Pombriant, analyst at Beagle Research, told the E-Commerce Times.

Last week was like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. You know how at the end they fire off a huge flourish of explosives, and if you live in Boston for some reason the Boston Pops play "The 1812 Overture?" It was like that minus the Pops. Actually, the crescendo was not limited to last week but to a rolling thunder effect that happened because many software companies have decided Q2 is a good time for analysts to visit the Bay Area...

This spring has seen a raft of software company events and announcements, and they've been good meetings full of real news and important new developments. It is as if these companies bided their time during the worst of the recession, building new product, thinking about the future and how customers will use their technologies. It was time well spent...

CRMC (Customer Relationship Management Conference) is being held May 29 to 31 at the Chicago Hyatt Regency. This annual event offers a unique agenda for retailers, Devon Wylie, CEO of CRMC told CRM Buyer. "It's specifically focused on case studies from topnotch multinational retailers. With this approach, attendees can get actionable learnings they can take home with them."

There was an interesting article about airlines in The New York Times last week, "When Flying 720 Miles Takes 12 Hours," but the subtext was all about CRM, or at least where CRM has to go. If you know me at all, you know I closely attend to macroeconomics and energy issues, and they are all over this article ...