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Salesforce held its Dreamforce NYC on schedule in early December, which you might have missed because of other news like Omicron and the looming chaos of the holidays ...

It's okay to give ourselves kudos for CRM's resiliency over the course of the pandemic. We did a heck of a job keeping most of the balls in the air ...

For most of my professional life, before I became an analyst, I was a sales rep, and my forte was software. Back in the mini-computer era, nothing was easier, and then harder, than selling software ...

For those born after the mini-computer era (co-terminus with the original Star Trek), dilithium is the fuel used to power a warp core propulsion system needed for interstellar travel ...

I've been on and off trying to get a handle on Zoho for a long time, feeling that calling it an SMB solution didn't do it justice, but I was stumped. The company provides roughly 50 apps and more services and widgets in a product set that culminates in Zoho One -- which Zoho bills as "The Operating System for Business." ...

This is not good ...

Let's start a new meme/hashtag/acronym: Global Information Network, or GIN. I know there's double entendre here, but we're entitled to have a modicum of fun in life, no? ...

I was doing research when I found a suitable definition of levels of abstraction. Honestly, it's a topic most of us know intuitively without ever fully defining it, like rain. Rain is water droplets that fall from the sky but few of us think about how and why clouds form and weather fronts move. We just know rain, also snow, and when pressed we bother tracking weather movements to see if a planned outdoor activity makes sense. But I wouldn't say that's understanding rain...

Dreamforce saw Salesforce continuing to build out a product offering that, in some ways, defies description ...

Dreamforce happens this week, emanating from San Francisco and reaching out to the world via the global cloud computing network Salesforce helped to create. With that, this may be the last time to say with all sincerity that Salesforce is a CRM company ...

I try not to write too much about earnings because I'm an analyst more focused on how things work -- or don't -- than I am on how much money a company makes. That's largely because I got into the CRM space before companies made money on it. In later market stages, products work, and the interest is in how predictable the company's earnings are ...

As a system of record, Salesforce, as well as just about every other SFA vendor, has stayed scrupulously neutral in the sales process debate of the last couple of decades. That is now changing, sort of ...

We are all trying to make sense of the new world we inherited from Covid. But it isn't just the pandemic that's shifting society; other macro events like what to do about the unfolding climate disaster (fix it, but how?) add an important dimension and all of it influences the direction of CRM for the foreseeable future ...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration ...

There's a virtuous circle pattern being drawn in society by CRM and it's been ongoing for many years already ...

It looks like we're ending Salesforce Season. This is a new idea for me, and I think there may be two seasons in a year -- the one we're finishing and one that happens just before Dreamforce. Roughly speaking, these seasons happen when the company disgorges a raft of new technologies both to update existing products and to bring forth new ones ...

It's time to call it. We're through the looking glass and work is fundamentally changing. I had been thinking that once the pandemic was sufficiently behind us, we'd see people flocking back to the office and that would be that ...

Not too long ago, commerce executives worried about how to make their digital systems as good as in-person interaction. They had reason to worry, too ...

I have that same feeling I had when I started my career in the mini-computer era because what was old is becoming new again ...

Various CRM vendors have been issuing interesting survey results from the pandemic that purport to show the "new normal" in full flower. Salesforce did so recently, and now Oracle is getting into the act ...