The Role of Social Data in the Enterprise

Informatica‘s Chris Boorman posted his thoughts on the “ability to pull in data from the world of social media to understand more about our customers and prospects.” His blog post, Embracing Social Data Within The Enterprise, focuses on both cloud data integration and Master Data Management and provides examples of organizations that have blurred the lines between social and business data. His conclusion:

“From a data integration perspective this opens up a whole new world as companies look to gain competitive advantage and look to use this new world of data in previously un-thought of ways!”

Check out the blog post here and this video of Chris speaking about the role of social data in the enterprise:

…and here’s a demo of pretty cool cloud integration use case showing the ability to pull Twitter data into Salesforce CRM.

Cloud Integration at Informatica World 2010

I’ve already posted some of the cloud integration highlights and the keynote from Informatica World 2010, and I’ve had a few people ask me if the main stage Informatica Cloud demo would also be available. Apologies for my excitement at the end. I get pretty excited about this stuff…
Here is the demo:

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Interactive History of CRM Software

As we get ready for Dreamforce 2010, I thought I’d share an interesting interactive CRM Software History posted on the Software Advice blog. According to the author, “the timeline includes 18 key events that have shaped the CRM software industry over the last 30 years. It’s a quick way to understand the context of current events in the industry.”

It’s a work in progress, but a few quick observations:

• Anyone remember sales.com?
• What about Upshot?
• No mention of Siebel OnDemand or now Oracle OnDemand
• No mention of many of the Salesforce innovations post 1999:  AppExchange, Force.com, Apex Code, $1B in revenues, Chatter….
• Is Social CRM ready to be included or is it not quite ready for prime time?
• Sweet picture of Tom Siebel in 1993
• Speaking of Siebel, the positioning of their acquisition by Oracle is pretty harsh:

“With little light at the end of the tunnel, Siebel agrees to become the next addition to Oracle’s pile of acquired enterprise applications.”

What else is missing? What’s next? What are your thoughts? Accurate timeline or a bit of revisionist history?

You can view the CRM Software History timeline here.

Salesforce Co-Founder Interviewed at Oracle Open World

Here’s a good interview with Parker Harris at Oracle Open World (still seems weird to say). He gives a nice teaser on Dreamforce. Every year there seems to be pressure for the company to change the world. Even bigger push into social CRM and platform as a service on the way? What’s it going to be this year?