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Last week my good friends Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg opened up their online show, CRM Playaz, to an executive roundtable discussion with some of the movers and shakers in our CRM world. ...

Throughout the early fall, analysts have been treated to a continuous stream of announcements from the CRM community, especially Salesforce and Oracle. New product availability belies the facts on the ground of an economy hobbled by a pandemic. It's a gusher of good technology intended for a market eager to snap it up. That said, I am not sure about the market and we might be looking at a technology glut...

As Winston Churchill famously said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Optimistically, out of COVID, the mother of modern crises, we can reasonably expect some upside ...

Many people have worked at less than full speed over the last seven months or more, but some people managed to get more done than others. A raft of new technologies that impact CRM are about to be announced, but even without the latest announcements due now through October, there's a realization that we're coming full circle. Things we thought about and argued over decades ago are back, in different forms, with new solutions...

Technology's fall selling season is gearing up for year-end as it always does, coronavirus or not, and the CRM industry follows suit with some mods. ...

Salesforce announced big numbers in all of its financials when it reported its FYQ2 results this week. But we're accustomed to the CRM company reporting good results, so the biggest news to my mind comes from elsewhere: The company also announced that as of August 31, it will replace Exxon Mobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ...

The IDC CRM market share numbers are in for 2019 and for the seventh consecutive year Salesforce leads the pack, this time with 18.4 percent of the market. Other big vendors trailing the leader include, SAP 5.3 percent, Oracle 5.2 percent, Microsoft 3.7 percent, and Adobe 3.6 percent ...

Oracle continues to be the big software vendor we love to hate. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the brash prognostications of founding CEO and current CTO Larry Ellison ...

The emergency caused by the novel coronavirus is causing deep structural changes to how we do business. We don't sell or market the way we did before the virus, and it may be some time before we return to that model -- if indeed we ever do ...

Salesforce continues to offer new products in an expanding demonstration of its platform's relevance to business and society at large ...

The pandemic might be changing the way we work, but much of the need for change in our CRM tools predates COVID-19. Nevertheless, Salesforce last week introduced some changes in its Marketing Cloud that couldn't have been timelier ...

Company performance relies on how well a company is led, how engaged its employees are, and the quality of the technology at hand, which effectively means the tools employees can leverage. Certainly, there are metrics for all of this. But the trouble with metrics is that they are collected and administered by management which has a vested interest in the outcome of any survey...

Moving to the cloud was never going to be seamless or sudden. There was simply too much at stake for most companies to make a big switch. With the exception of many cloud native companies like Salesforce and NetSuite, most customers and vendors have had to find ways to transition from on-premise to cloud over the last 20 years, and those years have generated more, not fewer, options.

Some years ago, Marc Benioff told me he was not interested in developing back office apps that would compete with SAP and Oracle in the ERP and finance market. Many people, myself included, looked askance at that idea and wondered out loud how the company would continue to grow because, hey, there's front office and back office and nothing else right?...

I had a good conversation with a smart guy in Marin County over the weekend about the next normal. One thing he said seemed to be aimed at the heart of CRM. This impressed me because Kevin is not a CRM guy, though he started and successfully ran a couple of businesses for decades ...

These are extraordinary times, in case you haven't noticed ...

A little while ago I was recording a podcast with an up and coming CRM company focused on banks and credit unions, CRMNext, and one of the questions that came up involved what's on the CRM horizon. To be honest, no one really knows, but because I spend a lot of time trying to understand both this industry and the broader landscape, I am never without an opinion.

Oracle appears to be undergoing a kind of resurgence during the coronavirus crisis. Financial analysts are saying nice things about its ability to pay dividends even in tough times. Its technology, which always has been good, is seeing an interesting uptick ...

You can reduce the story of CRM to a lot of things, especially its many component parts. Social networking, cloud computing and analytics are mentioned often. We don't need an exhaustive list, but if we stop there I think we miss a lot ...

Oracle and Zoom Video Communications just entered a deal that, for once, is more about technological audacity than about dollars. The companies on Tuesday announced a partnership to host Zoom on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ...