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I saw a report the other day about the future of commerce that made me smile ...

As we slowly climb out of the Covid anis horribilis, advocates of the new normal (whatever that is) may wish to temper their prognostications about working from home or working from anywhere ...

Capturing return on investment on new software has never been more important than right now -- and never has it been harder to identify ...

People frequently ask me what's next in CRM. I have a lot of knowledge because I take a lot of vendor briefings, so it's a fair question but my understanding highly imperfect because what's next is a moving target. I'm better at declaring what might happen in five years than what will happen this year ...

Zoho might have had it as close to right as possible a couple years ago when they named their flagship product Zoho One and called it the operating system for business ...

The minor trend I began noticing over the last week or so is budding optimism about the future. COVID-19 cases and deaths are in decline, financial indicators are decent and trending up, and forecasters are predicting a booming economy. The Federal Reserve anticipates a 4.5 percent growth rate while Goldman Sachs says it sees growth at more like 6.8 percent.

Last week Salesforce made it official, coming back to the office will be a fluid thing -- and why not? The company has arguably done more in the last year to build systems such as Salesforce Anywhere and Work.com that enable workers -- at least a kind of knowledge worker -- to work from anywhere ...

Oracle's continued strides in the tech space say a lot about perseverance and deep pockets. It was a darling of the 20th century tech era, rising from a startup in the database wars and becoming the sole surviving independent database company. But at some point, success leveled out its rise and it became just another big company ...

One of the many disappointments we've seen in handling the COVID-19 crisis has been how cloud software companies have been almost shut out of participating in providing solutions. In some ways it's to be expected because databases and wet chemistry aren't a natural fit, but still ...

Marketing and loyalty have a lot in common, and not just what you think ...

Since the 1970s there's been a steady decline in the number of free-standing relational database companies until only Oracle remains. Familiar names like Sybase, Ingres, Informix, MySQL, SQL Server and others are either out of business or have been acquired ...

This might be a big year for CRM. I say might because I am not clairvoyant, and humility is on the resolutions list ...

I had a delightful conversation last week with Thomas Wieberneit, Marshall Lager, and Ralf Korb on CRMKonvos. These CRM Gurus and I were talking about the future of CRM and some of my recent research when the topic of value pricing came up ...

Holding Dreamforce online is like kissing your cousin. Obviously, you aren't in San Francisco -- and beyond that everything is shrunk to the size of the screen you're watching, and the format and duration are more made for TV than collegial interaction. I thought of initiating Dreamforce akin to the founding of the Royal Society, a group of people seeking to exchange ideas and advance the frontiers of science...

The front office is moving out the front door and into the world. Actually, it's exiting via the Internet, the windows, side doors -- and even the smokestack -- to form the basis of what will be the next normal, or whatever future historians want to call it. For a while, when we were just dabbling with mobility and social media, we could ignore all that -- but no more...

When a tech company gets big enough you can predict that some of its brainy and talented members will form a rock band. They'll play at company events like user meetings and these days this is just playing to form. A culture that moves fast and innovates to cause disruptive innovation is pure rock'n'roll ...

It is often said that only a poor workman blames his tools and only an inferior vendor blames the customer for their troubles with a product. But there's been a rolling mishap in CRM that I've been watching for 20 years. As someone who had another career selling and marketing technology products, I feel qualified to make some counterintuitive observations about CRM...

Last week my good friends Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg opened up their online show, CRM Playaz, to an executive roundtable discussion with some of the movers and shakers in our CRM world. ...

Throughout the early fall, analysts have been treated to a continuous stream of announcements from the CRM community, especially Salesforce and Oracle. New product availability belies the facts on the ground of an economy hobbled by a pandemic. It's a gusher of good technology intended for a market eager to snap it up. That said, I am not sure about the market and we might be looking at a technology glut...

As Winston Churchill famously said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Optimistically, out of COVID, the mother of modern crises, we can reasonably expect some upside ...