
The Economics of Cloud 2: Will It Drive Prosperity in 2011?
There are three relatively new technologies converging to make Cloud 2. All three technologies have been available for many years, though in less robust forms and with less powerful integration. The convergence is driven by their ubiquity, low cost and ease of use. They are social media, mobility and analytics. Together these technologies offer a…

PaaS choices today
In the light of Salesforce.com’s swathe of announcements at Dreamforce last week and other recent developments, it’s a good time to take stock of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) landscape. What are the choices now available to developers and business people looking to build applications on a ready-to-run cloud platform? As part of this review, I’ll report […]

Chatter: From Both Sides Now
The gala event, Dreamforce, isn’t really my gig. The Enterprise Irregulars know “up and down and sideways” everything related to Cloud-computing. One of our EIs, Anshu Sharma, was a key architect of Salesforce’s database.com offering announced last week. In short, I spare everyone my uninformed opinion on most things Cloud-computing related for which I’m certain […]

Well, I am a systems guy…
It’s amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word unique, which means one of a kind, if you add very or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today’s word might be amazing. There is entirely too […]

Impression from Dreamforce 2010
Long gone are the days when Dreamforce was a smallish conference devoted to SaaS; the first conference 10 years ago had fewer than 1000 attendees. This year’s conference had over 30k attendees (business users, IT users and vendors) almost 70% higher than last year’s. The lines in and around the Moscone, the hotel rates and […]

Sexy enterprise software, part two: SAP and Workday
Part one of this post establishes the premise that cloud-computing has reinvigorated enterprise software and describes the importance of feelgood mojo in creating a sense of customer delight. Related: Sexy enterprise software, part one: Salesforce.com gets its mojo As I explained in Part One, three events last week foreshadow the renewal of enterprise software as an […]

Salesforce Thinks Big – And Forcefully Part II
Yesterday, I covered the lessons of Dreamforce 2010 from what it revealed about salesforce.com’s going forward strategies, products, vision and other sundries. Concluded that there was some very good stuff. Today we head into the messaging and final thoughts and other resources you might want to read. The Messaging….Not As Clear This was mixed. Even […]

Pombriant on DreamforceLIVE
At last week’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Beagle Research founder Denis Pombriant was interviewed by Salesforce Vice President, John Taschek on DreamforceLIVE. Here’s the video (running time 11:14):

NetSuite: The quiet momentum
In the last week, you have read plenty about salesforce and its Dreamforce event and SAP and its influencer event. NetSuite had a small gathering for a few of us in town for those big events. And while that event got little ink, frankly it deserves plenty for momentum at the company. NetSuite has managed […]