Articles by Denis Pombriant

Earlier this year, in response to reports that Russian actors had used Facebook to disrupt the 2016 election, I wrote a few pieces about how one might go about fixing the problem. I am not sure I have solutions for everything, but what motivates me is the sagging feeling that settles in whenever society throws up its hands and punts. We can do better...

How do they really know? That's the question that immediately comes to mind in reviewing the top-level data from Voxpro's recent survey of customers and their relationship with chatbots. The data show that 68 percent of consumers haven't used chatbots to contact a brand. About 1,000 people answered the survey How reliable is that number, though? I'...

The conventional sales funnel exceeded its usefulness a long time ago, roughly when the Internet gave us the ability to gather our own information about vendors, products and services. Without the necessity of contacting a salesperson, individuals and businesses could eliminate the middleman in the information exchange, waiting to expose their interests much closer to decision time.

Digital transformation means a lot of things to different people, but if you do it right it should be virtually unique to your circumstance. The other day I caught up with Rip Gerber, CMO at Vlocity, the Salesforce partner that specializes in vertical industries like telecommunications and insurance, among others. Of digital disruption, Gerber told me, "Nobody changes anything without a strong business case," and he's right of course. Vlocity is a company focused on disruption...

For all of the dazzle of its rapidly evolving software portfolio, which includes a self-monitoring and self-patching database that also configures itself, as well as numerous cloud applications, Oracle has begun showing its credibility as a hardware vendor. Hardware has commoditized and will not return to the prominence it had in the early days of...

Markets grow at the margins. This bit of sage advice was given to me at the start of my analyst career, and it has kept me in good nick for nearly two decades. Of course the focus has drifted over time but that's the point: The CRM market has evolved, and the job of an analyst is to make sense of the evolution Oracle OpenWorld 2018 held in San Fran...

When we write the history of the IT era, the big factor that has played an important but not well recognized role will be hardware -- specifically, the Oracle Exadata appliance that puts databases into memory for fast access and updates. All of the cloud software starting with the autonomous database on view this week at OpenWorld -- like security...

For the last 20 years, CRM has occupied a preeminent niche in enterprise software. It has been the hip, up-and-coming solution in the front office, brimming with innovation and new approaches to some difficult problems that go back a long way CRM applied basic database technology to a business' chaotic collection of customer data, streamlining busi...

As of this writing, I haven't been prebriefed on what Oracle will be announcing at OpenWorld regarding CRM -- or as it refers to it, "CX" -- so this is a good time to express my own opinions Oracle's direction in the last few years increasingly has been toward cloud computing and the autonomous database, and each has several flavors or divisions. T...

As markets mature, they trend toward oligopoly or even outright monopoly. There isn't much difference, because an oligopoly has several members instead of just one. Examples include electric power generation, an oligopoly made up of vertically integrated monopolies in most areas, and the airline industry -- an oligopoly made up of many airlines that may have monopolies in regional hubs. As monopolies and oligopolies gain strength, it becomes increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter a market...

People at Oracle must sometimes feel like they're living in Mark Twain's reality. After hearing that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal, Twain published a quip for the ages when he wrote, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So too with Oracle. Ever since its earnings miss for its first fiscal quarter, a chorus o...

OK, this is looking somewhat predictable. Oracle has beat earnings estimates in seven of the past eight quarters, according to Forbes, with Q1 fiscal 2018 being its only miss. The company either met or slightly beat top-line expectations in six of the last eight quarters.

With less than a week to go, Dreamforce continues to bear down on the world like a hurricane slowly approaching from across the ocean -- in a good way, if that makes any sense. Salesforce has pumped new products into the market that will serve as the focus of at least part of the discussion in San Francisco. Also, CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff recently decided to buy Time magazine, one of journalism's 20th century icons...

More often than you might think, disruptive innovations travel in pairs -- at least until they are separated by the markets, which decide one is useful and the other not so much. Sometimes they're symbiotic. Both may be useful or even necessary -- like hardware and software -- but that's not always the case Consider the strange pairing of blockchai...

At the last Dreamforce, Salesforce introduced a new cloud dedicated to philanthropy, and the company began delivering on a three-part strategy this year. The Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud is a product of what used to be called the "Salesforce Foundation" but now is referred to as "Salesforce.org." The idea is not rocket science. The new cloud is de...

The Salesforce people whom I speak with are all heads down and breathing hard in the big push to Dreamforce. In other words, things are normal for this part of the cycle Unfortunately, I can't say things are normal for this time of year because Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld are, like Easter, movable. We've even taken on the language of Easter wit...

There's an emerging theme in sales and marketing that I expect will be important for a while and could influence some of the messaging associated with upcoming events like Salesforce's Dreamforce and Oracle's OpenWorld Each company will have lots to say about security, analytics, and machine learning, the Internet of Things, and blockchain, but wha...

No one at Oracle will ever be nominated for sainthood, and that's probably OK with them. Over the years the company has developed a bad boy image that in some cases is richly deserved, while in others it has been embellished by events Much derives from the brash doings of founder and longtime CEO (now CTO) Larry Ellison who, from all appearances, m...

The City of Sunrise Firefighters' Pension Fund recently filed a lawsuit alleging that Oracle executives lied about the company's successes in the cloud and engaged in coercion and threats to sell its cloud products, "creating an unsustainable model that fell apart." I don't understand everything about the new lawsuit, as I am not an attorney.

SugarCRM has agreed to acquisition by Accel-KKR, a leading technology-focused private equity firm. Although Wednesday's announcement calls the deal "a significant investment," what typically happens when private equity moves in is that venture capital moves out. Private equity likes to own everything and thus have greater control. Although venture...