Dreamforce 2016 Post Two: The Recap
Dreamforce 2016 was as action packed as expected. To close this one out, I’ll recap the announcements and dig deeper into a few subjects that I mentioned in my 1st post. Salesforce Einstein was the big topic of course, but there were several other interesting announcements and even a few surprises. Before getting into the […]
Platform as a Platform (PaaP)
The platform land rush is definitely on. You can’t swing a dead cat, as the saying goes, without finding an announcement about some new platform or some established vendor’s attempt to enhance its existing platform. Some sorting out seems to be in order. What’s not a platform these days? Well, if you can easily substitute […]
Waiting for change
A couple of weeks ago Allison Arieff wrote a piece in the New York Times titled “Solving All the Wrong Problems” that gets to the heart of the technical times we live in and its focus is not what you might think. She includes a long list of things we can buy or subscribe to […]
Integrating the Commerce Experience: Salesforce to Acquire Demandware
There’s a lot of good analysis coming out on Salesforce’s announcement last week on the intent to acquire Demandware and move into the commerce platform business. If you’re looking for some good reads, try this post by Paul Greenberg or this post from Ray Wang. I don’t intend to rehash what my colleagues have […]
Commoditizing software
For over 50 years, the IT industry has followed a well-known script associated with emerging and evolving paradigms. First a product or category is introduced, then it gains wide market acceptance (or dies on the vine) followed by a long period when vendors and customers seek out ever more efficient ways to produce the thing. […]
Comparing Software using Peer Reviews
The goal for a business software peer review site is to provide assistance to a buyer in researching and selecting an appropriate software solution (or at least it should be). There are many other uses for the review data once collected, and those uses may be a part of the way the site is funded, […]
Another day, another cloud
Salesforce seems to be on a roll this quarter making new clouds available left and right. We’ve seen two already in Healthcare and Education and today they announced general availability of the Financial Services Cloud. As I have written before, back in the day Siebel had over 20 industry versions of its flagship CRM product […]
Birth of the modern
Nearly every generation sees the birth of what for it will define modern life as going forward. As uncertain as the twenty-teens have been so far, some day in retrospect economists may pinpoint this decade as important as the tipping points of 1870’s and the 1920’s. If that turns out to be the case there […]
Endings and Beginnings
Almost ten years ago I did a slight career course change and moved from senior roles inside software companies to software market analyst. In that nearly ten years with analyst firm IDC, leading what has grown into a broad team of highly respected software market analysts, I have grown professionally and personally. For the first […]
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 […]
