Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here. Zach Nelson – President and CEO, NetSuite Biography Zach Nelson has more than 20 years of […]

Different Flavors Of Real-Time Result In Significant Implications. Many pundits, research insight folks, bloggers, and hand wavers keep talking about the need for real time in social business, analytics, mobile, and other disruptive technologies.  Given the volume of data, bandwidth constraints, and magnitude of business processes to be supported, is the notion of real time […]

Organizations Must Overcome Four Fears To Master Social Customer Data Over the past few weeks, I’ve been criss-crossing the country on a multi-city speaking tour talking about the strategic value of customer data. (In full discloure, the tour is sponsored by Informatica).  As we talk about the implications of social media and customer data, inevitably […]

Are you… A sales or marketing operations executive who’s struggling to get a single customer view across divisions or channels to make relevant cross-sell offers and increase revenue? A customer service or support manager who’s struggling to get a complete view of your customer’s relationship with your company to speed response times and boost customer […]

Are you… A sales or marketing operations executive who’s struggling to get a single customer view across divisions or channels to make relevant cross-sell offers and increase revenue? A customer service or support manager who’s struggling to get a complete view of your customer’s relationship with your company to speed response times and boost customer […]

Refresh Cycle Reflects Bullish Outlook By Partners and Customers Microsoft Convergence kicked off over the weekend in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia World Congress Center.  With an anticipated increase in attendance, many new product announcements, and a technology refresh cycle in play, attendees seemed upbeat.  The event kicked off in true tradition including the must […]

Salesforce.com Bets Big On Social Media Monitoring And Socialytics Salesforce’s definitive agreement to acquire Radian6 continues the consolidation of 100’s of social software vendors in the marketplace.  Radian6, a social media monitoring and customer engagement platform, provides tools for companies seeking to harness the power of social media and related social networks.  Most customers utilize […]

Greeting from London!  It’s been a great surprise to enjoy the sunny and warm weather (by UK standards) as I readjust my body clock.  Thankfully, I’ve had a chance to catch up with a few new and old clients, several analysts, media moguls, and in real life meetups w/ close relationships (i.e. @grahamhill and @buchanla) […]

Early Adopters Cross Through Five Phases Of Social Business Maturity Interviews with over 100 early adopters of social business (i.e. social crm, E2.0, social media marketing, etc.) reveal 5 phases of social business maturity (see Figure 1): Discovery. A few individuals begin the process of discovering new tools.  Individuals identify consumer tech innovations that impact […]

Organizations Seek Measurable Results In Disruptive Tech, Next Gen Business, And Legacy Optimization Projects For 2011 Credits: Hugh MacLeod Enterprise leaders seek pragmatic, creative, and disruptive solutions that achieve both profitability and market differentiation.  Cutting through the hype and buzz of the latest consumer tech innovations and disruptive technologies, Constellation Research expects business value to […]

Early Adopters And Pioneers Have Benefited From Social Across executive board rooms and even in living rooms, social business is all the rage.  In 2010, social crm (SCRM) and Enterprise 2.0 (E20) rose into mainstream conversation.  Despite the mindshare and awareness, a majority of business leaders have yet to begin these initiatives.  The good news […]

Acquisition of Heroku In Line With Platform Future of Salesforce.com At Marc Benioff’s keynote, the CEO reiterated his commitment to 6 clouds: Sales, Service, Data (Jigsaw), Collaboration (Chatter), Cloud Platform (Force.com), and Database (database.com).  As Salesforce.com continues to diversify its portfolio into adjacent markets, the platform as a service (PaaS) component remains a key area […]

Oracle Continues To Demonstrate Benefits From An Effective M&A Strategy A quick poll of 61 attendees at Oracle Open World 2010, revealed that 57.4% (35/61) of Oracle customers were positive, 29.2% (19/61) were neutral, and 10.8% (7/61) were negative about Oracle’s application strategy to date.  A continued stream of product enhancements and releases may be […]

(Photo: Copyright © 2010 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.) Oracle Day 1 Focused On Showcasing Both Software And Hardware Prowess The Day 1 keynote kick-off from Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, touched on the wide spectrum of Oracle’s broad software and hardware portfolio.  Despite an over-emphasis on hardware and appliances, Oracle also […]

Recessionary Forces Challenge Organizations To Not Only Right Channel, But Also Personalize Organizations with e-commerce initiatives face a flurry of competitive forces that challenge existing assumptions put in place a decade ago.  On the operational efficiency front, organizations must battle reduced product margins, shorter product life cycles, greater pricing transparency, and increased friction in multi-channel […]