Applications

For the last 15 years I've written year end articles on where we've been and where we're going in CRM and more broadly in tech. This year, as I went through the pieces I wrote, it struck me that the major topics that were important in 2019 would be equally important in 2020. In my mind there are sev...

We're used to discussing mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector, but splitting a company into two parts is a rarity. Analysts always have to ask who benefits and how? Shareholders? Other stakeholders, including customers? Employees? Why does this not happen more often? Surely businesses outgrow...

Among the highlights of Amazon Web Services re:Invent are three announcements that strengthen its presence in the enterprise hybrid IT infrastructure market: AWS is teaming with Verizon to deliver 5G edge cloud computing; the first AWS Local Zone is located in Los Angeles; and AWS Outposts are gener...

While it's easy to imagine AI and high performance computing platforms solving some of the world's most challenging problems, and simulating everything from the human genome to climate change, there are thousands of other applications that can benefit as well. Enterprises are rushing to push data, a...

If you're like most security pros, chances are pretty good that you're starting to get frustrated with microservices a little bit, or maybe a lot. Microservice architectures -- that is, architectures that leverage REST to build a number of small, distributed, modular components -- are powerful from...

The tools you work with have a lot of impact on what you can accomplish, and the more sophisticated the tools the better -- especially in software. Beagle Research just completed a study into the use of a DevOps strategy with the Salesforce Lightning Platform. DevOps is a strategy for building, chan...

In manufacturing, margins are everything. If you're like most manufacturers, your business operates on such tight margins that even a small change in the price list can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. So what happens if your sales team inadvertently uses an old price list and the cost o...

Since its introduction 30 years ago, businesses of all types have relied on one particular program for their presentations: PowerPoint. While the mobile phone has developed rapidly over the last 10 years, PowerPoint hasn't changed much in its 30-year existence.

Flaws in Amazon and Google smart speakers can expose users to eavesdropping and voice phishing. Researchers at Security Research Labs discovered that developers could create malicious apps for the Amazon and Google platforms to turn the smart speakers into smart spies. Using the standard development...

Now would be a good time to put Zoho on your radar if for some reason it isn't there already. The Austin-based company just announced Catalyst, a developer environment that helps programmers and others to speed development of apps and microservices with capabilities inherited from Zoho's apps portfo...

Oracle came late to cloud computing, joining the fray only after competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce had established dominant positions, and newcomer Amazon Web Services leaped from a standing start to a position of dominance. Amazon is so strong in the cloud that it is on the cusp of extingui...

The software development lifecycle reminds me of the proverb of the three blind people confronting an elephant. One grabs the trunk and says it's a snake, another touches a tusk and says it's a spear, while the third feels its side and calls it a wall. The moral is that perception has a lot to do wi...

It has been my belief for several years that our industry is trending toward the formation of an information utility. I draw this conclusion carefully based on my understanding of how markets develop and commoditize. I consider the beginning of the modern IT era as the early 1970s. You can graph a r...

As more Web traffic comes from mobile devices -- particularly traffic to e-commerce sites -- it's becoming ever more important for businesses to have content that loads onto small screens easily, quickly and effortlessly. To some degree, native mobile apps until now have filled that need, but they h...