Denis Pombriant

The year we have just started looks to be at least as strange as the one just completed. For me the big tip-off is that public companies have thrown their collective hands in the air and told the financial analysts that they can't even guess what their quarterly numbers might look like. Not being able to give guidance to Wall Street is certainly an eye-popping trend but, believe it or not, it has a bright side too.

The financial and economic events of late 2008 have set the proverbial bar at an incredibly low level, which could mean that it will be easy to exceed expectations. A word of caution though, exceeding very low expectations might not be enough to keep your boat afloat, so we all need to pull hard on the oars. Here are some thoughts on what it all might mean for CRM.

Cheap and Easy Does It

Everybody is going to be looking for a deal and why not. With budgets slashed or non-existent, customers are really going to mean it when they tell you to...

The economic troubles we are all now experiencing will serve as a boon to the on-demand market. It makes good sense that as further pressure is exerted on company budgets and balance sheets that many will look to economize by reducing IT expenses, however, those economies will take time to work their way through any organization. Translation – it was smart to begin on-demand adoption a few years ago but there’s no time like the present.

As good as all this might be for on-demand vendors – and it is good – there will be new challenges for them as they attempt to deal with expanding volume, that’s inevitable. One place where the strain of success might be first noticed for on-demand vendors is in billing and payments processing.

Almost since its inception, the on-demand (OK, SaaS) market has dealt with a hybrid solution in which companies delivered software as a service, but invoiced and collected the old fashioned way. It’s not well documented but the back...

The world is beginning to run up against significant resource constraints — the amount of arable land, available energy, peak oil, climate change and much more. What all these things have in common is the dawning realization that everyone can't have everything they want, or at least they can't own it. They may be able to rent it though and that's a major shift.

In prior eras such as the middle ages, there was a small upper class and a lot of very poor people. The upper classes owned all the property and all of the productive assets. Petty nobility held the land in the name of the monarch and peasants rented it for a percentage of the harvest. The same was true of infrastructure assets so for example, if you grew wheat and wanted to grind it into flour you paid your local lord (in flour of course) for the privilege.

Studying this phenomenon gave rise first to economics and later to communism as some analysts from the poorer side became aware of just how...

Last week NetSuite announced OneWorld, new technology that enables multi-national companies to manage their finances. If you are not a financial person, the distinction that the new offering provides may be lost, but let me tell you why you might want to care.

Multi-national connotes bigness — big company operations, offices, factories and personnel — working at different locations all over the planet. In fact, this connotation is valid, but it applies to smaller companies too. In fact, these days success for an emerging company is often closely coupled with the speed at which the company can achieve distribution in many geographies at once.

To complicate things, people in different places have their own currencies, work habits, laws and regulations and these differences represent a significant barrier to success for small companies. The same company might operate in English and use pounds sterling (and drive on the wrong side of the road) in one part of the...