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"When a company like Salesforce buys a company like Heroku, it's not for the technology, despite the fact that this is a good product," Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "CRM is a maturing market; the interesting things that will happen next are at ...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vibe when it was announced at Dreamforce. ...

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try something different this year. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 25, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

This story was originally published on Aug. 11, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series ...

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away, and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy, people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits ...

I spent part of last week in the Seattle area at a small meeting Microsoft organized for analysts. The purpose was to brief us on product positioning and plans, and much of the meeting was covered by non-disclosure. Consequently, I am at a loss for how much I can divulge in this setting, at least until things are announced. ...

One of the more interesting developments of the last week has been the announced acquisition of ATG (Art Technology Group) by Oracle. ATG is one of the leading suppliers of e-commerce solutions, and Oracle liked their stuff well enough to plunk down a cool billion bucks for the logo ...

Salesforce.com, one of the major players in the CRM space, has offered social site monitoring tools for a while, Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer. "Salesforce has some nice functionality in the service cloud that monitor social sites and identify issues," he elaborated. "It's a blend of customers helping customers, a knowledge base, and vendor employees helping customers."

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable ...

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and numbers that small companies prefer to keep to themselves.

I get a lot of email. It's not all because of my job or because I publish my work frequently. Some of it is like that, but it seems like my email address is on a lot of lists, and I am one of the people who get spammed whenever there's a webinar to fill. Perhaps you know this feeling. Last week I was invited to a webinar for a sales product, and it made me think about why we aren't more successful and what might be done about it. ...

"They have done a super job building a configurable UI," Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "Almost any user can set up the screens and windows," he said. "Once that is done, the streamlined flow shaves some time and provides efficiency -- and, mos...

RightNow Technologies certainly has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the company used its industry influencers day in Colorado Springs this week to remind us. ...

Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in the weeds with social CRM. Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL! ...

My favorite scene in "The Social Network" is when Mark Zuckerberg's character has an epiphany that Facebook's screen should have a field to designate a user's status, as in relationship status or availability. ...

This story was originally published on Jan. 20, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

A lot went down at Oracle OpenWorld. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all, and you can easily find it online if you wish. I was impressed with several things that Oracle did, including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of compute servers. ...

I don't know how much Oracle spends on research and development each year. I know the biggest piece is being spent on CRM these days, something that warms my heart. The R&D number is in the billions of dollars, and though I cannot confirm it easily, the number seven seems about it. Judging by the turnout and the number and quality of sessions available at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week, the billions buy a lot, and they are well-spent...

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course of normal lives. Gladwell's Ted Talk gave me an insight about CRM...