
Platforms: What FinancialForce, Xactly, and Hubspot Understand
Platforms – can’t live with them… pass the potatoes. I know, we all hate platforms. The crux of the problem is explaining what a platform is and how it works, I can write for ages about the details and go into nitpicking details – and never publish. The closest I got to it was the […]

Back Office Perks Up
What’s going on in the back office? That normally staid bastion of conventional computing is perking up taking on subscriptions and cloud computing like candy. It used to be that when you thought about back office and cloud in the same thought you also thought about NetSuite. Truthfully you still do, they’ve been at it […]

Zuora, Intacct Deal a Sign of Things to Come
We’re beginning to see an important differentiation, even a schism, in the enterprise software industry. It’s been building up for the last seven years and it will burst onto the scene tied in a bow this year. It’s the separation between conventional software suites and platforms and it is most vividly explained by front to […]

A Brief History Of Salesforce1
If I hear one more person tell me that Salesforce1 (S1) is a client-side app, a mobile client, the culmination of Touch (remember that launch? Not many do) or something similar I will scream (like I did the past few days).

Dreamforecast
For many years I have written a piece that attempts to forecast the major themes of Dreamforce. I believe I am not always right but the exercise is fun and helps me orient toward what should be happening industry-wide even if it’s not. This year is no exception. With no briefing yet from the company, […]

Why Salesforce Is Winning The Cloud Platform War
The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community. Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform. And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community. (To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned […]

Salesforce Launched Communities Today
(Event note: the traditional Salesforce marketing cycle is to announce a new model/slogan/message at a Dreamforce event, then take the next 1-2 yeas to strengthen the delivery of that message, refining it along the way in Cloudforce or Tour events like this one. This is what happened with the social enterprise, and what is happening […]

nCino — Loan Origination on Salesforce Platform, Gets the Records Right
This post is part of an occasional series on the AppExchange as Salesforce.com celebrates the seventh anniversary of its launch. The series will focus on some of the most interesting AppExchange applications of the last year. The arc of nCino’s brief existence provides a good description of the power of application development on the Force.com […]

Applications that are Social
I’m spending the week at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference (more on that in a post coming shortly) and at the partner keynote on Tuesday I watched a product demo that got me thinking about this concept that I wrote about a…