Mac News: Trends

Primary Indicators
July 29, 2009

I am hearing from vendors that their on-premise CRM sales in the early part of this year are pretty good. No one has briefed me ahead of their earnings calls, but the results from late last year and Q1 seem to be pretty good. I should probably wait until the numbers for the last quarter come out from the vendors, but I've seen enough to call an obvious trend.

Evolution, Revolution and Punctuated Equilibrium
July 01, 2009

Kudos to all those who participated in, organized or even attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in drizzly Boston last week. There is a lot to write about. The big ideas that I took away include disruption and evolution, ROI and a need to sharpen our focus. Here are a few thoughts on a very good show.

Outsourcing's No Longer In
June 30, 2009

Companies used to turn to outsourcing during tough financial times. The current global recession, however, has curtailed outsourcing as much as it has other parts of the economy. "Oddly enough, the global recession has hurt outsourcing significantly," said Chad Hahn, principal owner of Hahn Consulting.

Socializing the Revolution
June 24, 2009

Events taking place on the streets of Tehran may have an important effect on how social networking rolls out across the rest of the world, and that includes the CRM world. Last week, the media began carrying stories about a "cyber revolution" that may be happening in the Islamic Republic, but those stories fail to account for the whole story -- the yin and yang of social media.

Of 'Jurassic Park' and All Things 2.0
June 17, 2009

What do these things have in common? Maybe nothing other than that the movie has a sequel and the two-dot-oh suffix is a sequel. Also, the start of blockbuster movie sequel season overlaps with trade shows like Sales 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Sales 2.0 was held in Boston a couple of weeks ago, Enterprise 2.0 is coming next week, and I can't wait.

Toiling Away in 'White-Collar Sweatshops' - aka Call Centers
June 09, 2009

Sarah Betesh's career in customer service began in box office call centers at venues such as the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. She moved on to Tickets.com and Vertical Alliance, at one point becoming a call center manager. However, in spite of her success, Betesh left her call center career behind in 2003.

Paradigm and Disruption
April 15, 2009

I am fond of Paul Greenberg because he's smart and knows a heck of a lot about CRM -- most importantly, he's a good judge of whether a company is for real or just playing around. I am also grateful to him for pointing out that I was the fortunate one to identify on-demand technology as a disruptive innovation.

Recessionary Times Call for Recessionary Marketing
March 26, 2009

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing expenditures.

CRM All A-Twitter With New Salesforce.com App
March 23, 2009

Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, a new social media application. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a free platform that lets people send out messages of no more than 140 characters to as broad a community as they can build. The posts, or "tweets," as they're known, can cover any topic area.

Getting Customer Information Out of the Virtual Shoebox
March 19, 2009

Successfully leveraging an organization's collective knowledge has been an aspirational goal for decades, but many companies have deemed the effort as a "mission impossible" after investing time and money into these projects. Companies have fallen short in helping a distributed workforce apply knowledge to improve their business execution.

The PaaS Era, Part 1: Everybody's Pounding Out Mashups
February 24, 2009

Earlier this month Zuora, a startup that's less than a year old, launched Z-Commerce, a platform that gives developers access to its applications as well as Z-Force's API documentation, sample code and toolkits. There is also a sandbox environment, currently available in private beta. A few years ago, this might have seemed like an overly ambitious undertaking for small company.

The Salesforce Departures: Much Ado About Very Little
February 11, 2009

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in. I write a lot about Salesforce, so people were calling me up for comment trying to prove their hypotheses.

'I Feel Your Pain' vs. 'The Vision Thing'
February 04, 2009

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowing the same field, but you might notice the companies' approaches are very different.

Getting Leaner and Meaner: Q&A With Patni CFO Surjeet Singh
January 30, 2009

As the recession deepens and spreads across the globe, people have been asking themselves variations of the same questions: Can my company survive the recession? Can my industry? My home town? Global outsourcers are no different. It might seem that this industry would have a degree of immunity from recessionary forces. However, outsourcing industry dynamics have changed since the last recession.

Cloud Wars: A New Hope
January 14, 2009

Merrill Lynch once forecast that the cloud computing market would reach an eye-popping $160 billion by 2011, a prediction that mostly drew skepticism. While sizing up the expectations for a nascent tech market is equal parts art and science, there are growing indications that $160 billion may indeed prove to be accurate.

Time to Build Your Communities
January 07, 2009

Happy New Year! Let's be counterintuitive for a moment, shall we? We're in a recession and we all know it. Traditionally (and sadly) in an economic downturn, when companies seek to lower their expenses, they cut their marketing budgets -- and why not? Marketing costs money.