Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he’s painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the … Continue reading →

This year, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event–with a record-setting 45,000 attendees–got me thinking about the early days before the cloud was the cloud, how far its come, and how perfectly poised it is to ride the waves now driving technology adoption–mobile and … Continue reading →

Last week, Intuit and Salesforce.com announced that they would partner to integrate Intuit QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online small business accounting software with Salesforce’s small business CRM editions (Contact Manager, Group and Professional). Under the terms of the deal, Intuit will … Continue reading →

The SMB Group has followed (and used!) Dimdim, which has provided innovative, easy to use Web conferencing services in a freemium model with very liberal terms of use, for a couple of years. In January, Salesforce.com acquired Dimdim for $31 … Continue reading →

I’ve been very impressed by HubSpot, which helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) optimize and streamline their inbound marketing programs (see my 2009 interview with HubSpot Marketing VP Mike Volpe) for a while now. Looks like others are impressed too—as … Continue reading →

This week’s service outage at Intuit is fueling a new round of speculation about the dark side of cloud computing–and whether businesses can depend on cloud-based services to run their businesses. Intuit’s problems come on the heels of other service … Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event–along with about 19,000 other people. Having had a chance to digest the proceedings (as well as Thanksgiving dinner), here’s my commentary on what stood out as the top takeaways from … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s Here and Now at lunch time while running a few errands in my car. I tuned into a great story about the “Plain English Campaign”, which was founded in 1979 by now 71-year old … Continue reading →

Last week, Unit 4 Aggresso, parent company of CODA, announced that it has teamed up with Salesforce.com to launch FinancialForce.com. FinancialForce.com is actually Coda2Go, the cloud based accounting application that CODA built from the ground up on the Force.com platform, … Continue reading →

With market adoption of cloud computing forecast to skyrocket, no one in the tech industry wants to be left on the ground. But, as cloud computing platforms, models and definitions multiply, they’re becoming as numerous and diverse as Mother Nature’s … Continue reading →