Articles by Denis Pombriant

There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests Part of an email from John Borkowski of WebiMax reads:...

My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part compliment and part benediction: "Good on you." They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like "goo-don you." At any rate, good on you Last week's smackdown of the PIPA and SOPA legislation designed to build a back do...

Customer experience is leading off the year as an idea that we need to pay more attention to. In the last week, two important publications have surfaced that highlight this importance. SAP gurus Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer and Volker Hildebrand (all senior officers at SAP) collaborated on a new book, The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Te...

There is an interesting discussion brewing about the nature of Silicon Valley companies. Are they "tech" companies, as Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo asserts, or are they "... companies in other industries that happen to make heavy use of technology," as CBS Money Watch blogger Erik Sherman says? The gentlemanly disagreement started over the appointment of P...

It's the beginning of the year, time for sales kickoff meetings and presidents' clubs at some location within 10 degrees of the equator. These signal events will reward those diligent and fortunate enough to have made or exceeded quota while focusing the attention of everyone on this year's mission. Typically that includes higher quotas and some new faces determined to ramp up before their draw runs out...

Peter C. Whybrow, M.D., is a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuorscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, or at least he was when he published American Mania: When More Is Not Enough in 2005. In the book he quotes numerous economic thinkers and writers from the last 300 years, including Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) and Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), as he analyzes how we behave in modern business...

Welcome back to the discussion At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business. We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture. Forty miles per gallon is the new 30, someone said, and I have seen or heard the word "sustainable" used tent...

This story was originally published on Oct. 19, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing wit...

There was an interesting article in the January 2012 edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine I've come to enjoy though for many years regarded as another of those things my wife would like more than I would. But VF carries an interesting blend of current events and politics, as well as the glossy pictures and stories of pop-culture icons that seem to be necessary to sell a magazine these days. ...

Every year around this time, I write two columns -- one on the year that was and another on what I expect the new year to bring. There is no methodology for this process, and I believe this lack of method is important. I take a blank screen and fill it up with what has been on my mind for the last year and what made it out through my posts. ...

Forrester Research has been heating up the marketplace lately with a string of interesting reports and forecasts that impact CRM and the front office generally. One that I saw, "Capitalizing on Live Video Chat" by Diane Clarkson (Aug. 23, 2011) talks about the bright future of using video (obviously) rather than text chat in sales, service and support...

I was sitting in the "blogpound" at Cloudforce New York, the seating area where Salesforce.com considerately places press, analysts and bloggers along with tables, power and WiFi, when it dawned on me: Despite all the articles, blogs and books (and Paul Greenberg's ceaseless public speaking) dedicated to the social media phenomenon in CRM, we may have been under-reporting its importance all this time...

Economics is a social science, much to the chagrin of neoclassical economists who prefer to think of it as a hard science, like physics, full of equations and certainty. I think of myself as a Keynesian, and while I can see the equations, the certainty eludes me. What I see mostly are people, all of us, with our reptile brains wrapped in a layer of mammalian sensibility trying to satisfy our needs. Economists refer to us as "rational actors," but we are hardly that...

On an otherwise slow news week, I spotted a story emanating from a Gartner analyst, Dennis Gaughan, at a recent Gartner talk in Australia. The article was on Business Insider, and I found it interesting ...

There was a guest post on the Forbes Magazine blog last month that I can't get out of my head: "For Enterprise IT, Time to Move Beyond SAP." For the record, I am an ERP dilatant -- I know about it but don't follow it with the same passion that I follow CRM. And as far as SAP is concerned, I have rarely met a bunch of smarter business people who ar...

If you've been in this business any length of time, you've become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what's next? We've had our share of net new ideas over t...

A couple of years ago I read The Black Swan and was so taken by the subject matter that I wrote a column about it. The book had to do with the kinds of unknown issues that can strike even well-understood processes. Now, Leo Sadovy, a vice president at SAS, has taken the concept further in a blog just posted Tuesday. Sadovy reminded me of the im...

At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss? It was a fine idea. Customers came to San Franci...

I am developing an appreciation of the Occupy Wall Street movement that surprises me. You know the news about it and how over the weekend the movement went global. You probably also know that the authorities are not dealing with it effectively. They've been content to watch and wait, hoping that the movement will exhaust itself. That's a good strategy for the last millennium, and the movement may wear out if only because as winter approaches it gets harder to remain committed to living on the street. But I wouldn't bet on it...

What struck me most last week in San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- beyond Oracle OpenWorld -- came out of meetings I had with CEOs of software companies situated south of Oracle on Route 101. The companies are all SaaS (Software as a Service)-based, and I promised not to spill the beans, so there will be no names -- yet Admittedly, my survey is ...