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Denis Pombriant got right to the point relating his initial impressions of the event: "Michael Phelps just did a cameo. ..." Other links to the conference:...

"Peak oil" is a term that resonates very little with about 95 percent of the population. I discovered this by asking a lot of people and getting blank stares. A few hardy souls ventured a guess, and those guesses were not far from reality. If you take those words to a search engine you will be surprised by the number of hits you get. I got nearly 5 million hits the first time I searched on the term. ...

The latter can be particularly difficult to estimate, Beagle Research Group Principal Denis Pombriant told CRM Buyer. "As liquid fuel becomes more expensive, you have to constantly recalibrate the numbers around the potential savings and potential opportunities." Offsetting t...

Microsoft has experienced delays in refreshing its CRM software, notes Denis Pombriant, and even skipped a whole version number as a consequence The market is likely to forgive the lapse, though, especially given the set of features the application now offers, Yankee Group ana...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting part, and I was glad to see it ...

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. Like everyone else, I will be publishing some new research this month as well, though I won't be ranking vendors this time...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a US$31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. ...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesperson. I am riding today with the knowledge that this mode of travel is going to again become the standard for business travel in the years ahead...

This week, Sage Software is bringing out version 11 of ACT, its high-flying contact management software. ACT has been around since the mid-1980s and has been through multiple incarnations and owners in that time. ACT was what you used back then if you were tired of keeping notes on paper and wanted to improve the way you sell. I can remember a DOS (disk operating system) version of the product that would look almost alien in comparison to today's slick GUI (graphical user interface) version. ...

This summer, I have been doing a lot of research into sustainability and have developed some thoughts that relate to CRM, especially CRM 2.0 ...

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom (BT) on Tuesday for US$105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering ...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. ...

Despite the changed competitive landscape, other vendors will likely increase maintenance fees as well, Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer. The overall inflation rate and huge energy price increases will be the culprits "In a company like SAP that...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I knew and understood that platform pretty well and the jolt of cutting over cold turkey was both surprising and refreshing...

Ease of use and software simplicity have been mainstay messages in CRM for many years. I have watched as this messaging has alternated with financial benefits for a long time, and I am not sure if it's random alternation or if there might be economic undertones, but it seems like we're trading themes at the moment ...

Recession talk is all around us, and CRM has a role in helping any company get through the slump. How? Take our quick quiz ...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? ...

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. Good show, nice people, well run, and it was held at a swanky new Westin on the waterfront. It got me thinking, though, about the "two-dot-oh" phenomenon and how badly it needs a rethink ...

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfied with the classical model of economics and began looking for an explanation that better represented the facts that they saw daily...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the realm of consumers, occasionally a practitioner in the industry takes a stand as well. Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, vented about American Airlines in his post. He didn't have a bad experience, but does have his reasons to target American...