(Editor’s note: I have heard that some readers felt I was papering over the East India Company’s utterly horrific rule and not according it the condemnation it deserves. I apologize for giving that impression. I also may have made it more clear why I mentioned the East India Company at all. I’ve made some changes ..read more

The recent Next Generation SAP Enterprise Architecture Forum, engineered by SAP community impresario Paul Kurchina and hosted by SAP in Newtown Square, was one of those rare events that’s so rich and varied I know I’ll be mining it for ideas and inspiration for months to come. So bear with me as I try to ..read more

There’s always a surplus of things to write about following a Zoho event. There’s the great customer stories, the new technology offerings and the growing number of applications under the Zoho One umbrella (50+). Other great topics include CEO Sridhar Vembu’s take on capitalism and transnational localism, the sensible position Zoho is taking on AI ..read more

I don’t often have the pleasure of talking to as interesting a set of customers as I met at the recent Acumatica Summit in Las Vegas. Not just because all the meetings were unstructured, no artifice, no-handlers-present conversations – which means that everyone, customer and analyst included, can truly get the most out of a ..read more

I attended a lot of conferences last year, including way too many in the month of October alone. While the conferences spanned a wide range of vendors, industries, geographies and customer types, a set of transcendent themes continued to bubble up to the surface, themes decidedly different – real, as opposed to artificial, if you ..read more

I hit the SAP conference circuit hard this fall, attending six conferences in four weeks, four in-person and two online. October saw me live and in-person at SuccessConnect in Las Vegas, SpendConnect in Vienna, and the Cloud ALM Summit in Mannheim; as well as on-line and not well-connected with CXLive at the end of the ..read more

The evolution of the enterprise software services industry has been an interesting one to observe over the last 30 years. It was in the early 1990s that a concept called business process reengineering fostered the at-times unholy alliance of enterprise software vendors and global systems integrators and created the modern ERP industry. That alliance has ..read more

Not too long ago I was preparing a talk about the importance of community in enterprise software and I found myself trying to explain why Salesforce.com’s Trailhead training and community platform is so successful. Then I came across a picture that explained it all. In it a bunch of Trailblazers were gathered around the main ..read more

It’s been a storied ride for Marc Benioff since the founding of Salesforce.com, and for the most part the story has been seen as all upside. Category creation, leadership, and dominance have all been Salesforce.com’s birthright in the CRM industry, and Benioff has been the chief architect of this unparalleled ride up the enterprise software ..read more