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Most of the people I talk to think of a business model as the way a company makes money. We certainly agree on that. One's business model can encompass numerous things, like product mix, marketing and sales plan, how you sell -- direct, channel, retail -- and lots more. One thing that usually misses inclusion, at least where SaaS companies are concerned, is the cloud model, which I consider as important as the sales and marketing piece...
SAP is holding Sapphire, its annual user meeting in Orlando, this week. Sapphire is one of the premiere events on the IT tradeshow calendar, along with Microsoft Convergence, Oracle Open World, Sage Insights and Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. These events each draw tens of thousands of people from around the world, and each has a distinctly different vibe...
Yesterday Zuora, the billing and payment solution company for subscription businesses, did a smart thing, at least I think so. At NetSuite's user meeting, SuiteWorld, Zuora chief Tien Tzuo announced that his trademark product is now pre-integrated with NetSuite's financials. But that wasn't what's smart, only the thing that enabled the thing that is smart...
Admit it: You never think about data storage any more. We used to, quite a bit. Long before the storage glut that exists today, there was already too much of it, and it was hard to find places to store it. When we built software, it was with an eye toward maximizing our limited storage capacities, we looked after computer memory the way thirsty...
I hate to sound like Dr. Doom and Gloom, but have you paid attention to the cost of gasoline lately? Of course you have. It's sickening to watch as prices resume their inexorable climb. The last time we saw prices spike was the last time the economy was in decent shape -- right before the wheels fell off in 2008 The global economy is based on th...
Marketing has become the new hot spot in CRM. During the recession and even before, there was a great flurry of interest in customer service and related things. Consequently, we have seen a lot of attention being paid to customer experience, and much of the social-media-oriented growth in that period was centered on the existing customer As the e...
ATLANTA -- This might be remembered as the Convergence where Microsoft finally began to converge. More specifically, it is the convergence where accounting and CRM met in the cloud. The big news coming from Convergence is the announcement that Microsoft AX, one of the company's three ERP systems, is moving to the cloud. You could look at this a...
Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer care for telco and related industries' customers This...
Thumbing through the current issue of Wired, I came upon a multi-page ad spread from Microsoft, and I saw what looks like an interesting juxtaposition, though there was nothing in the ad itself that made the connection. I have also been interviewing some of the industry's best and brightest recently on the subject of revenue performance management, or RPM, and the combination provided the source of my fascination...
I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day, and while I don't usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I've been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven't thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as a differentiator, so perhaps this is timely The l...
On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies (which it is), but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times As a social learning company, Jambok leverages social med...
One of the more revealing things I heard from Marc Benioff at Cloudforce 2011 in New York last week was his idea about how his company will continue to build out its product line. Marc's never been super secretive about his general direction, though product specifics have always been closely kept. But in our conversation, he reiterated a long-held belief that makes more sense than ever...
There's a great Churchill quote, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all other possibilities," which I think applies to our long sojourn in the valley of social networking. Social networking is important and will be a major part of our future, but I can't help but think that the way we are appro...
The upheaval in the Middle East is roiling the energy markets, and that will affect CRM. Year-over-year, the price of a gallon of regular is up over half a buck nationally, and the average price for said gallon is US$3.18. As gas goes, so does jet fuel. The confluence of rising prices, political unrest and a recovering economy all contribute to the price rise. ...
Sage took a major step in clarifying its position in the market when it hosted an analyst day in Boston last week. The company has been around for a long time and has been one of the higher revenue generators for many years thanks to an assortment of products that span the front and back offices of SMB companies. But the company grew through aggressive acquisition, and that left it with a hodgepodge of products and a weakly defined strategy...
What a week that was. I am still digging out from two snowstorms and dealing with bone-chilling cold, and so are friends across the country, except in the Bay Area, which only makes me envious Perhaps none were as adversely affected as people on the LSD (that's Lake Shore Drive for out-of-towners) in Chicago. I take solace in two forms: one, pitc...
The long recession and the rise of social CRM were not simply coincidental. I believe they happened together. That's not to say that social CRM happened for some cosmic reason; I neither subscribe to the belief that all things happen for a reason nor do I believe I am qualified to hold forth beyond what I've just written. I think social CRM -- ...
Microsoft did some smart things last week when it announced its Dynamics CRM Online service. Most of the headlines will focus on the teaser rate or introductory pricing of only US$34 per seat-month for 12 months. Until June, users of Oracle CRM On-Demand and Salesforce who switch will have an added inducement of up to $200 per user, which everyone acknowledges ought to go to conversion costs. ...
Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas had a coming out party. Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty -- that's 8-oh, my goodness -- tablet PCs to the world. Now, by itself, that's significant, especially for CRM, and something hard to miss even if you're a proverbial blind horse. But let's not stop there; to understand the significance for CRM, we can analyze more information...
We're coming back. We aren't out of the proverbial woods, but we should be on the upswing from the long downturn. According the Labor Department, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December, bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent. Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator, so even better Most importantly, this was not a one-time...
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