The circus known as Dreamforce and the company behind it: A 2014 Retrospective
Over 150,000 registrants, 5,000,000 online streaming views, and well over 1,000,000 meals to help feed the hungry. The stage(s) featured execs from some of the most recognized organizations in the world, a former US Vice President (Al Gore) and Secretary of State (Hillary Rodham Clinton), the poster … Read More»
Demand for speed driving investment in customer analytics & marketing technology
The cabbie welcomed me and we started on our way to Dulles. The snow had been falling for hours, and his impression was that people would be trying to beat the weather. I was indeed leaving a bit early to make sure to catch my flight back to the West Coast. The email I received that morning from my … Read More»
Five Important Microsoft Dynamics Themes From Convergence 2014
Spread out across downtown Atlanta, in the blustery shadows of CNN World Headquarters, Microsoft Convergence 2104 took place last week. For those unaware, Convergence is the conference where the Microsoft Dynamics customer and partner communities get together to learn, share, and network. This … Read More»
Tech vendors Microsoft and Verint bolster knowledge and customer interaction capabilities
2104 got off to a bang today as Verint acquired Kana, and Microsoft is acquiring Parature. Both Kana and Parature enable companies to have better interactions with their customers by providing relevant answers to customer needs across channels with speed and accuracy. Verint is an … Read More»
Dreamforce 2013: What Salesforce1 actually means
Dreamforce is a circus. It's a human phenomenon. On many levels, it makes no sense. Is there really such a center of gravity that over 100,000 people would care to pay attention and invest time, money and resources in attending a software vendor's user conference? Maybe if Green Day, Sean … Read More»
Enterprise Software Chronicles: A synthesis of the rapidly evolving customer technology landscape
Over the past several weeks, I've had the privilege to have hundreds of conversations with technology vendor executives, resellers and system integrators, consultants and companies of all sizes (enterprise, mid-sized, and SMBs) across a variety of industries; high tech, professional services, … Read More»
IBM Watson enters the realm of customer engagement
While I get to see and hear about hundreds of product announcements, this one is particularly interesting. The race to leverage computing power to synthesize incredibly huge amounts of disparate data in real time to meet the needs of customer demands is the next frontier of customer … Read More»
Learning from New Orleans: Microsoft’s opportunity for the future
It takes nearly 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other of the over 1,000,000+ square foot Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The conference center provided a fitting metaphor for both the breadth of Microsoft's offerings and the distance that Microsoft Dynamics CRM has … Read More»
Rapid digital innovation fueling vast complexity and opportunity for customer experience executives
I was recently invited to keynote a series of executive events hosted by NICE Systems. For those unaware, NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors, representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 150 countries, and including over 80 of the Fortune 100 … Read More»
Divergence at Convergence? Is it a Resurgence?
This past week I had a chance to spend some time with Microsoft executives, customers, partners, and industry "influencers" at Microsoft Convergence 2012 in Houston, TX. Perhaps one of the largest announcements at the event was Microsoft's pending support of multiple platforms and multiple … Read More»