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People keep calling me to ask what Salesforce is going to announce at Dreamforce. My standard answer is, how would I know? I get briefings like a lot of analysts, but in a situation like this you usually have to promise to hold the news until the company makes its announcements. ...

The CRM Idol competition starts this week. If you aren't aware, here's the basic rundown. ...

Maybe I'll take some heat for this, but I am trying to live by Don Tapscott's and Anthony Williams' ideas, especially concerning transparency. Let me digress already ...

Someone (you know who you are) recently commented on my post about curation. ...

On Sunday, July 10, Time Magazine posted a book review of sorts by Rana Foroohar. "Driven Off the Road by MBAs" is really a riff on Bob Lutz's new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. ...

We tend to think of social media as a property of CRM, and it is, but the story hardly stops there. ...

Something interesting is happening at Sage, but it looks like the company isn't ready to tell its whole story. That's a challenge if you happen to be hosting a combined partner and user group meeting, which Sage did this week in Washington, D.C. The company's annual get-together had its share of announcements and keynotes, and the new CEO, Pascal Houillon, did a good job of introducing himself to the assembled masses. He made several announcements too, but I think some of the importance of Sage Summit happened between the lines...

Ever wonder what the opposite of CRM would be? I have. In my ruminations it's not as simple as matter and antimatter, up and down, left and right -- though few of us would consider antimatter very simple. If I gave you written directions to my house, you couldn't get home simply by turning the sheet upside down. Opposite isn't simply backward ...

If you are a regular reader, you know that from time to time I write about things that appear to be tangentially related to CRM -- at best. My favorite alternative to straight ahead research and reporting on CRM is a strange sounding thing called "peak oil." ...

There's a huge difference between the enterprise world and the social media community. While there are many signs of life on the social side, the rank-and-file Global 1,000 seem for the most part to be clueless. That's not an indictment, just a statement of fact, and maybe opportunity ...

Last week Marc Benioff was in Boston with another regional Cloudforce tour event, and Stephen Denning has written a good book. There is a connection between them ...

I heard a phrase the other day that resonated with things I've been thinking about and talking about on the stump recently, but I had never heard it so succinctly. I was taking a briefing from Zuora, a company involved in providing on-demand billing solutions for companies that deliver on-demand services ...

A couple of weeks ago, Marketo announced its research-based belief that its form of revenue performance management (RPM) could help grow global GDP by US$2.5 trillion by 2015. I love it when emerging companies talk about big plans this way. It reminds me of the young plumber who upon seeing Niagara Falls for the first time says, "I think I can fix it!"...

Most of the people I talk to think of a business model as the way a company makes money. We certainly agree on that. One's business model can encompass numerous things, like product mix, marketing and sales plan, how you sell -- direct, channel, retail -- and lots more. One thing that usually misses inclusion, at least where SaaS companies are concerned, is the cloud model, which I consider as important as the sales and marketing piece...

SAP is holding Sapphire, its annual user meeting in Orlando, this week. Sapphire is one of the premiere events on the IT tradeshow calendar, along with Microsoft Convergence, Oracle Open World, Sage Insights and Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. These events each draw tens of thousands of people from around the world, and each has a distinctly different vibe...

Yesterday Zuora, the billing and payment solution company for subscription businesses, did a smart thing, at least I think so. At NetSuite's user meeting, SuiteWorld, Zuora chief Tien Tzuo announced that his trademark product is now pre-integrated with NetSuite's financials. But that wasn't what's smart, only the thing that enabled the thing that is smart...

Admit it: You never think about data storage any more. ...

I hate to sound like Dr. Doom and Gloom, but have you paid attention to the cost of gasoline lately? Of course you have. It's sickening to watch as prices resume their inexorable climb. The last time we saw prices spike was the last time the economy was in decent shape -- right before the wheels fell off in 2008 ...

Marketing has become the new hot spot in CRM. During the recession and even before, there was a great flurry of interest in customer service and related things. Consequently, we have seen a lot of attention being paid to customer experience, and much of the social-media-oriented growth in that period was centered on the existing customer ...

ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, is moving to the cloud. ...