Articles by Denis Pombriant

Sometimes you walk away from a user group meeting concluding that the company didn't introduce much that was really new. You might get the usual product announcements or the dot-version releases and you may take a course that makes you a little smarter about the fine points of some esoteric feature that helps you to do your job. You might say that such gatherings are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. ...

The other day I had a conversation with some nice people from the market research company Coleman Parkes Research. They wanted to tell me about a study they have recently concluded about social networking. I have to say it was pretty interesting stuff. I will leave it to you to search for them and to download their full report. What was intere...

"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surprised by the number of hits you get. I got nearly 5 million hits the first time I searched on the term. ...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting part, and I was glad to see it When it announced the ...

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. Like everyone else, I will be publishing some new research this month as well, though I won't be ranking vendors this time...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively light, and the addition will strengthen the overa...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesperson. I am riding today with the knowledge that this mode of travel is going to again become the standard for business travel in the years ahead...

This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted to improve the way you sell. I can remember a DOS (disk operating system) version of the product that would look almost alien in comparison to today's slick GUI (graphical user interface) version. ...

This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0 The whole idea of "sustainability" deserves some contemplation. Too often we see the word applied to just about anything that needs to look a little bit green. Sustainability and related words absolve a multit...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for US$105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering Peeling the onion and trying to get beyond the cash, this is an imp...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am of the opinion that CRM should cast a big shadow ...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I knew and understood that platform pretty well and the jolt of cutting over cold turkey was both surprising and refreshing...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading themes at the moment Over the last couple of weeks, I h...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz A recession happens when:...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a need for something else, partly because the market ...

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. Good show, nice people, well run, and it was held at a swanky new Westin on the waterfront. It got me thinking, though, about the "two-dot-oh" phenomenon and how badly it needs a rethink See, the problem -- whether we're dealing with Enterprise 2.0 or (maybe) CRM 2.0 or Anything 2.0 -- is ...

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfied with the classical model of economics and began looking for an explanation that better represented the facts that they saw daily...

I once played organized football -- not that I was any good at it, but I played it with relish. My favorite parts were anything that had to do with disrupting the opponent's carefully planned plays, which included covering kickoffs and punts as well as regular defense. This bit of information has almost nothing to do with this column except that it points out an early character trait (some would say flaw) that has perversely influenced my career...

After a long build-up, I think we're finally at the real beginning of a new era in computing. The previous (nearly) 10 years have laid an important foundation, by which I mean on-demand computing, but if you thought that was it, I think the next few years could blow you away Take a look at the driving forces in computing today -- they at least incl...

Zuora introduced itself to the world this week, and while it is not a typical CRM company, its position should have a big impact on CRM and all other markets that offer on-demand solutions. Founders Tien Tzuo, K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou, formerly of Salesforce.com and WebEx, chose the usually sedate billing market because they have a new idea that looks like it has legs...