How Crowded Is “The Cloud”?
A few months ago I asked you to help us (Famous Analyst to the Stars and partner Denis Pombriant and I) with research we were conducting around cloud adoption. I told you our initial thesis was that cloud adoption was – er, well.. complicated. We are not even talking about cloud architecture (public versus private […]
The tyranny of spreadsheets
As a former sales and marketing guy I am more than familiar with spreadsheets as a not-so-good tool for managing the avalanche of data generated by the front office even before the big data craze. Name a department or function in business and you can easily find someone using a spreadsheet to manage it—often poorly […]
Sage and Salesforce: Odd Couple Alliance?
I have been expecting this announcement for a long time but it still came as a surprise when Keith Block, vice chairman Salesforce, made an off the cuff remark in Boston at the Salesforce World Tour event last week. In February Sage and Salesforce announced that they’d work together with Sage moving some of its […]
FinancialForce Investment
It takes prodigious amounts of moola to launch a company these days and that’s especially true when trying to insert a new idea into the collective consciousness. Salesforce spent well over $100 million to convince us that SaaS CRM was real, Zuora has raised nearly 2X that amount defining the subscription economy, and cloud ERP […]
Platform Native
A number of Salesforce AppExchange partners including Apttus, Kenandy and ServiceMax formed an alliance called the Force United Consortium back in April but I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone about it. It’s a cool idea and a way to differentiate a partner that makes good use of the Salesforce1 Platform. I got […]
Platforms: What FinancialForce, Xactly, and Hubspot Understand
Platforms – can’t live with them… pass the potatoes. I know, we all hate platforms. The crux of the problem is explaining what a platform is and how it works, I can write for ages about the details and go into nitpicking details – and never publish. The closest I got to it was the […]
News Analysis: Salesforce 1 Signals Support For Digital Business at #DF13
Salesforce Seeks To Tackle Digital Business At Dreamforce Over 125,000 virtual and physical registrants descend on San Francisco the week of November 17th for Dreamforce 13, a future of technology meets SXSW event. One day in advance of the largest enterprise software event of its kind, Salesforce.com announces Salesforce 1 (see Figure 1). The Salesforce […]
Why Salesforce Is Winning The Cloud Platform War
The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community. Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform. And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community. (To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned […]
Applications that are Social
I’m spending the week at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference (more on that in a post coming shortly) and at the partner keynote on Tuesday I watched a product demo that got me thinking about this concept that I wrote about a…
Salesforce.com Plays In the Enterprise – Again
Back in 1999, I was a salesforce.com user and at that time, it was a rather kludgy sales force automation application that didn’t do much right – for example if I tried to export a .CSV file it gave me an .XLS file and vice versa. I read something by Marc Benioff then that said, “we […]
