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There was brisk business in associated user group meetings in San Francisco before Dreamforce. For some reason, I don't understand why Dreamforce starts in the middle of the week this year, which is fortunate for two reasons: Hurricane Irene clobbered travel operations up and down the East Coast over the weekend, and given the number of users coming from the east, it was fortunate. Many people were able to reschedule flights, though some inevitably missed being at Dreamforce this year...

Salesforce.com has been front and center the past couple of weeks, revving up for its Dreamforce '11 cloud computing industry event, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. ...

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. ...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse ...

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...

Avaya is delivering multimedia capabilities to the front line with its Tuesday announcement of two new contact center products designed to bring agent-assisted and automated customer service up to speed with the social networking world. ...

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!"...

Italian security researcher Rosario Valotta has discovered a new way for hackers to steal their victims' online credentials -- stealing the session cookies from whatever site a victim is visiting ...

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...