Enterprise adolescent: Salesforce.com's struggles at 15

It’s no way to celebrate a milestone birthday. Salesforce.com may claim to help 100,000 companies understand their businesses and make money, but in the week Salesforce turned 15, it emerged that the firm needs to get its own house in order. Chief financial officer Graham Smith revealed in a correspondence with the US …

[Pascal Monett]

Does this remind anyone of anything ?

The words "dog food", "eating" and "your own" come to mind.

Or does this mean that Salesforce is useless in financial reporting ?

Not using it, so don't know, but this article seems to indicate that if Salesforce is indeed using its own products, it doesn't help.

[Gordon 10]

oh ffs

Since when has the comparatively small dataset produced by a CRM app had anything to do with big data?

all they need is some bog standard financial reporting and analytics - something that could have been bought in or developed out of the box years ago.

Anyone whi talks about CRM and bigdata in the same breath should be dragged outside and shot for not knowing what they are taking about.

[Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics]

Jargon evolution

Reporting became decision support

Decision support became business intelligence

Business intelligence became analytics

Analytics became big data

The problem is that while technology has undoubtedly progressed, arguably requiring new jargon along the way, marketeers reclassify everything that's gone before under the latest hot term.

As a result, big data is today used to refer to anything from genuinely large scale data analysis using things like Hadoop, down to basic reporting capability embedded in CRM systems - or not, as the case may be :-)