Every June over past several years, after the high season for traveling to major vendor events subsides, and before everyone takes their summer vacations, a group of selected enterprise applications analysts have become accustomed to attending the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. “Grape Escape” is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her enterprise software vendors’ client base. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series started with my invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second-largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to attend its UK 2010 user conference. Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009.

My post then talked about another important development that preceded both the UK user conference and the Boston analyst tour (but which was not the topic of either gathering). Namely, in the fall of 2009, UNIT4’s on-demand venture, CODA 2go, evolved into FinancialForce.com, backed by both UNIT4 and Salesforce.com. The spin-off joint venture combines CODA’s 30 years of designing and building financial applications with Salesforce.com’s cloud computing development platform, Force.com.

The creation of the new entity and expanded relationship with Salesforce.com avails FinancialForce.com (and indirectly UNIT4) of many practical go-to-market and operating benefits, from branding and lead-generation to Salesforce.com providing hosting and the first-line customer support for the new offering (so that clients only have one number to call).

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It would not be far off the mark to say that social media, user-generated content (UGC), and online collaboration all hit the mainstream in 2009, at least in the realm of business-to-consumers (B2C) commerce. According to Forrester, 63 percent of online retailers will make social e-commerce a top priority in 2010, with The Limited brands leading the way.

As consumers and individuals, most of us have been effectively using Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn for various personal and professional purposes. The Web 2.0 tools and technologies have certainly leveled the playing field, similar to what the advent of the Internet and e-commerce did in the late 1990s (i.e., by further enlarging the so-called “global village”).

Consumers are increasingly turning to each other to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” to empower themselves with useful info and facts to keep sellers honest. “Consumers are so good at detecting when people are lying to us; we know very easily when people are telling the truth and when they’re not,” says Chris Brogan, co-author of the “Trust Agents” book.

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Part 1 of this blog series established that by offloading non-essential and non-value-adding routine tasks to third-party business process outsourcing (BPO) specialists, many human resource (HR) and payroll managers are now able to focus more on strategic and more important tasks of managing talent and human capital of the company. The discussion then went into the possible liberation of chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers from their daily grind mindless chores. Read the rest of this entry »