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Every year I write two columns that are a little different. The first, which is this one, is my attempt at quality control and I use it as much for sport as to assess how I did a year ago in predicting the events of the year now ending. You might think I would learn from this, but the second column goes ahead and makes the same mistakes I made a year earlier -- trying to predict the year ahead. Here it goes...

Sales 2.0 is a big deal both because it is causing us all to take a new look at selling -- along with all of the social networking ideas and technology that is changing our work habits -- as well as for what it says about marketing ...

Maybe GRC is the new ROI, maybe not, but you can't deny that ROI is getting old. ROI is simply a metric that measures the excess profit (or return) made by implementing (or investing in) a solution, minus the cost of the solution, when compared to not having implemented the same solution. GRC is governance, risk and compliance, three things people outside of the executive suite are not likely to care a lot about...

They pulled out all the stops at Oracle Open World last week to unveil a whole lot of advanced and interesting business technology. It was the 30th anniversary show, but the emphasis was clearly about the future -- not the past ...

I was looking forward to writing more on Sales 2.0 this week. Selling is something that I am keenly interested in, but it will have to wait for another time. A call from a client set me off in another direction ...

OK, I get it. I went to the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week and there was a lot to like about it ...

My natural inclination right now is to say something like, "I want to buy a vowel," but really, I want more ...

I have been anticipating the Sales 2.0 conference coming up in San Francisco for many reasons. As a certified, bag-carrying sales guy for a number of years, selling is part of me and though I am an old dog, I do enjoy at least hearing about new tricks ...

What a week. It's amazing how much news you can make by throwing around a few billion dollars. We found that out by observing the sound (though maybe not the fury) of SAP and Oracle placing billion dollar bets on the future outlines of the enterprise software industry ...

It is turning into a busy end of the year with the CRM and Software as a Service industries advancing on multiple fronts. So far, we've had Dreamforce and all of the announcements that went with it. SAP has announced SAP Business ByDesign, available in 2008, and last week made NetWeaver available by subscription too. Salesforce.com and SAP are doing a lot to define two very different strategies for the future of enterprise computing...

The big news when Saleforce.com released its latest version of what is hot in the CRM space -- Winter '08 -- was Force.com. The immediately understood subtext was that Salesforce.com had officially begun its migration to a platform on-demand company, launching the first salvo in what Denis Pombriant, managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, wrote could be the next platform wars...

Just a couple of weeks ago, two terms, on-demand and Software as a Service (SaaS), were used interchangeably -- it was truly a difference without a distinction -- but a lot has changed in a short time ...

During Dreamforce there was a panel discussion for media and the financial and industry analysts. Some of Salesforce.com's senior executives were there for a panel discussion, which included Chief Financial Officer Steve Cakebread, cofounder and Executive Vice President Parker Harris and Vice President of Marketing George Hu, as well as company CEO and founder Marc Benioff...

I saw Marc Benioff in New York just after Labor Day. He was in town for various business reasons and hosted a dinner for a group of customers, analysts and journalists ...

My last few columns have been focused on new technologies that are making their way into the broader CRM suite. Expanding the CRM suite has never been easier, as platform vendors like Salesforce.com provide all the capabilities necessary for innovative developers to add something to the ensemble. Here, I thought it might be fun to explore the flip side...

Dave Duffield, most famously the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday, was giving a keynote presentation at the RightNow user conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., when it hit me. Duffield is about to become a kingmaker in the on-demand market ...

Back in the bad old days, before there was much available on the Internet, there were practically no useful information available about companies, their executives and their possible business problems ...

I'd like to continue on the idea of modernizing our sales processes. Part of this modernization has been the focus on de-spreadsheeting selling. As we all know it started with sales force automation, or SFA, but the trend is alive and well and, if anything, gaining momentum ...

The front office computing market continues to impress me despite the fact that I have been covering it for so long ...

Taking credit is something we human beings love to do even when we might not have a great deal to take credit for -- unless there's bad news and then no one wants to own up ...