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Tell them what you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you told them. ...

Enterprise 2.0 came to Boston this week, and that made me happy because it is one of a very small number of events that I don't fly to. Being a native, it's nice to take the train into the city and to be able to sleep at home. Despite this convenience, I was only able to attend on Tuesday, and I concentrated on the vendor show floor at the expense of missing some very good keynotes and sessions...

In today's world of cloud-based services and legislative forces that are upping noncompliance penalties with each passing day, the application of email encryption as a strategic tool is back on the front burner. ...

It had to happen sooner or later; the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is, yippee! ...

At this year's CA World 2010 event in Las Vegas, the company unveiled its cloud management road map, along with a working plan for a family of new solutions that will form its CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite in the months to come. That's not the only change that CA Technologies brought to the agenda. ...

At this year's CA World 2010 event in Las Vegas, the company unveiled its cloud management road map, along with a working plan for a family of new solutions that will form its CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite in the months to come. That's not the only change that CA Technologies brought to the agenda. ...

At this year's CA World 2010 event in Las Vegas, the company unveiled its cloud management road map, along with a working plan for a family of new solutions that will form its CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite in the months to come. That's not the only change that CA Technologies brought to the agenda. ...

All is not well in venture capital land; at least, it's been a lot better. In April, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), which works with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop industry data, reported its numbers for both fund-raising and investment, and it represents a world turned upside down. Rather than paraphrase, here's the actual data from the press release of April 12:...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage held its partner meeting in Denver, and Microsoft sued Salesforce...

Sage's introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking. The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is "SaaS" (Software as a Service), or now "cloud computing," and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the definition into barely recognizable forms. Enough of this, I say; let's do a re-think...

One of the frustrations of new technology is that quite often even the vendor lacks a coherent understanding of an innovation's business context. ...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- at least I'm tired -- about each of these, so rather than another recitation of events, I want to spend this piece drilling into one aspect...

If you think long enough about acquiring a CRM system, you will come to vendor lock-in, the idea that you won't be able to easily change vendors down the road for whatever reason. It's almost an existential problem, like rent and alimony put together. Every approach to CRM has its benefits and deficits, and ultimately it comes down to what you are comfortable with...

While we're on the subject of the customer relationship, it's important, even vital, that we do a better job of teasing apart customer types. It seems to me that the vast conversation about social CRM and the social customer has focused on the end consumer -- the business-to-consumer (B2C) relationship -- not the business-to-business (B2B) one. That's probably a smart over-reaction to the fact the about two-thirds of the economy consists of B2C transactions. ...

OK, some people thought my last post was somehow bearish on social CRM, but I don't agree. I am trying to be accurate about what we ought to reasonably expect, nothing more ...

One of Salesforce.com's challenges in driving Chatter's acceptance comes from positioning it for the buying public. That's a tall order since the company is simultaneously trying to establish a new product and its category ...

You could be forgiven if you thought Salesforce.com was done with announcements if you attended the soiree in New York last week, but if you thought that you'd also be wrong. Kendal Collins, CMO of Salesforce, told me that there will be another announcement on April 27 in San Francisco, and according to Collins, "This will be big." ...

Cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise in a big way, but for some companies, there's an issue that is starting to come up in a lot of conversations with their service providers: the geographical location of their data. ...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? ...

As the population ages, financial institutions and other service providers will have to learn to adapt their marketing approaches to appeal to a sector that has high disposable income and substantial spending power. In some cases, they will also have physical limitations that will impede online activities, including vision loss. ...