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For the last 15 years I've written year end articles on where we've been and where we're going in CRM and more broadly in tech. This year, as I went through the pieces I wrote, it struck me that the major topics that were important in 2019 would be equally important in 2020. ...

We're used to discussing mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, but splitting a company into two parts is a rarity. Analysts always have to ask who benefits and how? Shareholders? Other stakeholders, including customers? Employees? Why does this not happen more often? ...

Business-to-business marketing is evolving -- and it's not just the industry itself. Vendor marketing efforts with customers can and should evolve as well. When you see a vendor selected repeatedly, or it officially earns a designation as a preferred vendor, it's a sign of marketing evolution ...

There were more than 170,000 people at Dreamforce a couple of weeks ago, and many more watching from afar. Also, there were well over 2,000 sessions (full disclosure, I led a panel discussion on employee engagement). Numerous announcements sprang from the big Salesforce event. ...

With Dreamforce only days away, it's no surprise that Salesforce is making a flurry of announcements. What is surprising is that there are two big ones this week involving partnering with other vendors, mostly on infrastructure -- announcements that I believe make the idea of an information utility more real with each passing day ...

I've been imposing on the world sharing my theory on the formation of an information utility for some time now. Various big vendors have announced alliances with that kind of aim ...

Dreamforce is next week. Once again, the sold-out show will be headquartered at San Francisco's Moscone Center and overflowing to the ballrooms of neighboring hotels. Over the years Dreamforce has become the Las Vegas of trade shows in one important respect. Both are famous for being bastions of excess. Vegas has excesses of the sensual kind, while Dreamforce offers a business and technology equivalent.

We've been watching the CRM-ization of healthcare for a while. A few years ago, Salesforce embarked on parallel paths. The obvious option was to build tools that enabled users to craft systems of engagement. The second started when the company also began reaching out to various industrial sectors with its technology and those of some partners ...

The tools you work with have a lot of impact on what you can accomplish, and the more sophisticated the tools the better -- especially in software. My company, Beagle Research, just completed a study into the use of a DevOps strategy with the Salesforce Lightning Platform, sponsored by DevOps solutions provider Copado. ...

Bob Stutz is a great guy. I have interacted with him occasionally over the years in his various senior postings throughout the CRM industry and always found him to be kind, generous and thoughtful. Last week he announced he was leaving his position as head of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which he's been at for four years, and taking a job as President of SAP's CX effort.

Now would be a good time to put Zoho on your radar if for some reason it isn't there already. The Austin-based company just announced Catalyst, a developer environment that helps programmers and others to speed development of apps and microservices with capabilities inherited from Zoho's apps portfolio. ...

I wanted to like Kara Swisher's piece in The New York Times about Facebook's attempt to wrestle with its demons, but I can't. It feels too much like self-delusion. ...

I have been writing about Salesforce for 20 years. That's incredible for me because aside from marriage, there's nothing in my life I've done so consistently for so long. Perhaps, like a marriage, the thing that's been attractive about Salesforce is its constantly changing nature ...

Oracle's struggle to enter the cloud infrastructure market was the focus of a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek. The company came late to cloud computing, joining the fray only after competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce had established dominant positions, and newcomer Amazon Web Services leaped from a standing start to a position of dominance.

The software development lifecycle reminds me of the proverb of the three blind people confronting an elephant. One grabs the trunk and says it's a snake, another touches a tusk and says it's a spear, while the third feels its side and calls it a wall. The moral of the proverb is that perception has a lot to do with perspective ...

I was speaking to an Oracle executive about some of the company's announcements at last week's OpenWorld, and my impression that the company has changed so much that it is difficult to recognize it from the entity it was just a few years ago. ...

Q1 in any business is the toughest for generating revenue and Oracle is no exception. In its Q1 earnings call it admitted missing by about US$70 million on a $9.2 billion nut: small but consequential. No need to run for the smelling salts though, Oracle has been here before and it's got this ...

It has been my belief for several years that our industry is trending toward the formation of an information utility. I draw this conclusion carefully based on my understanding of how markets develop and commoditize. I also believe large swaths of this utility deserve regulation (that's you, Mark Zuckerberg) ...

So now Oracle is appealing the Pentagon's award to Amazon of its US$10 billion JEDI contract to provide cloud computing solutions. ...

Salesforce continues to grow, albeit a little slower than in prior quarters. At least that's my reading of a US$4.0 billion quarter that's 22 percent better than the same quarter a year ago. I am used to seeing growth percentages in the high 20s but I am not concerned about a slowdown ...