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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

(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…

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,…

Episode 1: Firstup When I wrote about silo-busting last time, it was clear that vendors, systems integrators, and customers have a lot of work to do if they hope to fix their silo problems and the endemic dysfunction silos bring…

One of the best things about the enterprise software market is a little upstart called Zoho. This is a company that aspires to be the purveyor of the “operating system of business,” and to a certain extent they’re well on…

It was one of those made-for-the-tabloids scandals: a tale of financial misdeeds that included a former British Prime Minister; one of Switzerland’s largest banks; a major industrial company with dealings in the UK, Australia, and South Africa; the venerable and…

It’s really hard to have a conversation with or about SAP without hearing something about RISE with SAP. Its dominant position in the marketing and sales efforts of the company has made it inescapable, whether you’re a customer listening to…

There’s a play on words I like to use whenever someone is publicly disparaging another member of their own profession: “professional discourtesy.” It can be seen as a form of revenge, and like revenge it’s often best served cold. Sour…

Last year I wrote a post complaining how Teams has become a perfect example of bloatware, and was gratified to see the response: basically a concurring pile-on of messages and comments, with literally only one or two people trying to…

I think there is a terrible irony in Microsoft kicking off this week’s Ignite event – one dedicated in large part to the concept that Microsoft’s vision of collaboration will be a core component of the transition to a hybrid…

I admit I’m shamelessly drafting on Jon Reed’s excellent post on customer success proof points by posting this a little ahead of my original schedule, but the timeliness was too good to ignore. The fact that we were both working…

Here’s the deal: customization is everywhere in enterprise software, and most of it sucks. Sucks like a tattoo that looked good for one wild night in Vegas, sucks like that best friend you invited over for a weekend who’s still…

The starting point for this post was a conversation with an industry veteran about innovation, in which he opined: “SAP doesn’t innovate anymore. How come they don’t have something like HoloLens?”

I’ve been pondering that declaration for a while. I agree…