Search Results

Results 761-780 of 1102 for Denis Pombriant
INSIGHTS

New Pearls in a CRM Classic

Finally, Paul Greenberg's new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light hit the streets last week, and with it, my description of him as our Walt Whitman remains intact. To promote the continuing franchise, the fourth edition's cover has the same design as the third edition but with a different color scheme. But that's about the only similarity between editions; everything between the covers of edition four is new...

INSIGHTS

Hello, Ladies

This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84 percent) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all have more women visiting them. ...

INSIGHTS

CRM Trends and Misconceptions

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." ...

INSIGHTS

PaaS and the Democratization of Innovation

I was re-reading Eric von Hippel's excellent book Democratizing Innovation and found something in it that might help explain the popularity of cloud computing and Platform as a Service (PaaS). I am on the way to Dreamforce and have little visibility into what Salesforce.com might announce in the next day or two, but no doubt there will be a lot about the cloud, so this might be a good opportunity to make my point. Regardless, I will have more to say later...

ANALYSIS

A Tale of Two Sages

Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. ...

INSIGHTS

From Mainframes to I-Frames

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. ...

INSIGHTS

Black Swans and Blue Birds

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages ...

INSIGHTS

Meet-Up Month: RightNow, Sage and Microsoft

Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park (for sticklers, "Pikes" really should be "Pike's," but the official U.S. naming convention eliminates the apostrophe). The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good idea; it's a nice place...

INSIGHTS

Sales Forecasting and Say’s Law

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them ...

INSIGHTS

Oracle Fusion in Context

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points at the Churchill Club. Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it, and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time. For example, Salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service, and many other companies do too. ...

INSIGHTS

The Salesforce Cloud

In the continuing discussion of cloud computing, Salesforce.com occupies a unique place. While most cloud vendors have kept to one component of cloud computing, Salesforce has inserted itself into all areas, and the company is using its flagship CRM applications as its first case example ...

INSIGHTS

Shortage, Abundance and Synthetic Relationships

As luck would have it, I knew nothing about Larry Ellison's rant at the Churchill Club on Sept. 21 about cloud computing when I wrote last week's piece on cloud computing. I saw it on YouTube. ...

INSIGHTS

What Is On-Demand?

I have an ongoing conversation with an industry executive about the nature of on-demand, SaaS and cloud computing. The central question is, what is it exactly? Our conversation is always thought provoking, and I come away from it with at least some additional perspective. Sometimes I think the discussion is incredibly philosophical, like the question about a tree falling in the forest -- does it make a sound if no one is there to witness it?...

INSIGHTS

Motherhood, Apple Pie and Demodularization

Modularity is next to motherhood, hot dogs and apple pie in the pantheon of unarguably good things. However, for every rule there are exceptions, and in technology, at least, we may have entered the age of demodularization. For the moment, hot dogs and all the rest are safe, at least at my house ...

INSIGHTS

The Shifting Call Center Paradigm

What is it about customer service that drove three major CRM companies to make announcements about their service products within days of each other last week? Oracle and Salesforce.com each announced new or completed development of functionality, and RightNow said it bought HiveLive, a social networking solution provider. In fact, every company's announcement had something to do with social media...

INSIGHTS

Funny, Beautiful Symmetry

There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way ...

INSIGHTS

Customer Experience vs. Service-Product

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is off the mark, as I think it is, then what is the right approach?...

INSIGHTS

Customer Experience and the Magna Carta

Last week I was doing some research for a speech, and I remembered something from a weekend stint at a cooking school that I decided to run down. I was trying to make a point about customer experience when it occurred to me that the idea has ancient roots ...

ANALYSIS

The Appointment Principle

Beagle Research did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising, and I present some of our findings here ...

INSIGHTS

Main Street Meets the Cloud

Late on a summer morning recently I got a call from my wife saying "On Point," a public radio program, was doing a show on about cloud computing. "Isn't that what you write about?" she said. "You should listen or call in." ...

CRM Buyer Channels