Mar 8, 2021 5:00 AM PT
Zoho might have had it as close to right as possible a couple years ago when they named their flagship product Zoho One and called it the operating system for business.
Over more than 20 years we ve watched as CRM went from a bunch of disparate front office apps, to a suite, and then to a platform for building, maintaining, and most importantly customizing front office applications.
We re at the point now that there are numerous platform-based front office suites that give their users the ability to modify business process support on the fly in a direct effort to keep up with changing business conditions.
Mar 1, 2021 5:00 AM PT
The minor trend I began noticing over the last week or so is budding optimism about the future. COVID-19 cases and deaths are in decline, financial indicators are decent and trending up, and forecasters are predicting a booming economy. The Federal Reserve anticipates a 4.5 percent growth rate while Goldman Sachs says it sees growth at more like 6.8 percent.
This involves a lot of buying and selling at both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer ends of the spectrum. So now might be a very good time to take inventory on plant, equipment and employees through the lens of CRM.
Jan 14, 2021 5:00 AM PT
Since the 1970s there s been a steady decline in the number of free-standing relational database companies until only Oracle remains. Familiar names like Sybase, Ingres, Informix, MySQL, SQL Server and others are either out of business or have been acquired.
So, it would be reasonable to believe that the database market has commoditized, and that one relational DB is as good as another (plus or minus), though today Oracle has the dominant share of the market. But if commoditization was true a few years ago, it s certainly not now.
In the recent past, lost market share, technology hiccups, and a minor rebellion among users over pricing and related policies aimed at Oracle, helped to launch a new generation of databases from startups and well-heeled competitors like Amazon.
Jan 14, 2021 5:00 AM PT
Since the 1970s there s been a steady decline in the number of free-standing relational database companies until only Oracle remains. Familiar names like Sybase, Ingres, Informix, MySQL, SQL Server and others are either out of business or have been acquired.
So, it would be reasonable to believe that the database market has commoditized, and that one relational DB is as good as another (plus or minus), though today Oracle has the dominant share of the market. But if commoditization was true a few years ago, it s certainly not now.
In the recent past, lost market share, technology hiccups, and a minor rebellion among users over pricing and related policies aimed at Oracle, helped to launch a new generation of databases from startups and well-heeled competitors like Amazon.
Jan 4, 2021 5:00 AM PT
I had a delightful conversation last week with Thomas Wieberneit, Marshall Lager, and Ralf Korb on CRMKonvos. These CRM Gurus and I were talking about the future of CRM and some of my recent research when the topic of value pricing came up.
I didn t have a strong opinion about value pricing, in fact I haven t thought about it a lot. It s the idea that CRM products should be priced according to the utility they deliver, which sounds good, but it raises a lot of questions too.
For instance, who gets to determine the value received and, while we re at it, what is the right measure of value?