John Bruno

SAP announced a new name, market position, and strategy for its customer engagement portfolio. Instead of a potpourri of products, SAP will now offer the quirkily named C/4HANA, which is comprised of SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud (including CallidusCloud), and SAP Customer Data Cloud (Gigya). C/4HANA attempts to remind […]

SAP announced a new name, market position, and strategy for its customer engagement portfolio. Instead of a potpourri of products, SAP will now offer the quirkily named C/4HANA, which is comprised of SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud (including CallidusCloud), and SAP Customer Data Cloud (Gigya). C/4HANA attempts to remind […]

On Monday, Adobe announced its $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento. By adding eCommerce capabilities, Adobe is better able to compete with SAP Hybris, Salesforce, and Oracle. Why Magento? A number of commerce-centric offerings exist on the market — but none of them are like Magento. Magento has not only demonstrated growth, but it also boasts a vibrant community of developers and […]

Salesforce decided to round out its suite of CRM applications by acquiring an eCommerce platform. Sound familiar? Well, it should. In fact, it was less than two years ago that Salesforce acquired Burlington, Massachusetts-based Demandware. For those of you following at home, you might find yourself asking the very appropriate question of “why would Salesforce […]

The definition of CRM has changed. Yes, that is a big statement to make, but it’s an important one. CRM grew from a customer data repository into functional applications, first with sales automation and then to support customer service and marketing. Today’s enterprise software vendors cannot rest on “core” CRM functionality; their buyers demand a […]

Today Vendavo announced its acquisition of Endeavor Commerce. This move brings together Vendavo’s price management and price optimization capabilities with the configuration and quoting capabilities of Endeavor Commerce. You’re probably ready to ask me “John, there have been a lot of acquisitions in the CPQ space in recent years. What makes this one so different?” Well, […]

The CRM market is mature and the subsection of that market focused on sales, sales force automation (SFA), is even more mature. This market has lumbered along for the past 20+ years, but the dynamics between buyers and sellers today has brought upon the need for a new evolution. We’ve included 10 vendors in the […]

If you’re in a B2B environment, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the changing behaviors of your customers in recent years. As a result, technologies have shifted their focus to get closer to the customer and I'm not talking about just CRM or SFA. With a flurry of acquisitions and new entrants to the CPQ market popping up […]

Last week, nearly 170,000 business and technology professionals descended onto San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce. The event itself was ripe with discussions on social responsibility and charity, but most attendees, including myself, attended for other reasons. We wanted Salesforce to pull back the curtains on what it saw for the future of sales. […]

This week Microsoft announced a new offering (available in the Fall): Microsoft Dynamics 365. Sound familiar? It should. Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics AX all come to mind, and this was not done by mistake. Microsoft is bringing together the capabilities from these products, their intelligence tools, and third party or internally-built […]

Welcome to my Forrester blog. My career has been a blend of business strategy and technology, whether it was preparing people and processes for new technology eras as a consultant or diving deep into the technology while working in business operations and application development for a CRM vendor. What may surprise many of you reading […]