Ben Kepes
Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.
More about Ben here.
Continuity Rolls Out Public Beta of its Big Data PaaS
When Continuuity launched late last year I was pretty skeptical given the buzzword heavy press release, light on any real specifics. After spending some time talking with the founders however I was more positive, and not only because of the princely $10M funding round the company had just raised. As I said at the time: [...]
Apprenda Shifts the Game on Polyglot Vs Best of Breed PaaS
One of the biggest battles raging in the PaaS world has been between the Polyglot and the Best of Breed camps. In the polyglot corner stands Heroku, Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry who all say that only a platform that gives an organization the ability to develop in multiple different
Tensions in the Cloud Foundry Camp–On the Problems with Forks
Let there be no doubt, open source projects are hard. Balancing central control while still allowing individual members a degree of autonomy is like walking a tightrope – too much control and it looks like a dictatorship, too little and the initiative risks spiraling out of control in the face
Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further [...]
Chartio Supporting Salesforce–Pretty for the Enterprise
Two themes I often talk about are specific functionality from specialist vendors and delivering enterprise solutions in new and friendly ways. A good example of this I came across recently was from small company Chartio. Chartio, a Y Combinator company, touts itself as the best interface for data. Essentially it allows organizations to take data [...]
Box Answers IT Concerns–Deeper Security Option Roll Out
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dropbox releasing an entire swathe of new security functionality that sees it firmly mark itself as entering the corporate market and responding to the needs of IT. As I said at the time, Dropbox has long signaled an intention to move up the food chain. In [...]
StitchLabs–Solving SMBs Inventory Woes
Many readers know that outside of technology, I own a business that manufactures apparel and other products and sells them both online and through retail outlets. Having been involved in that business for 17 or so years, I’ve had first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to run a tightly integrated operation with e-commerce, [...]
FinancialForce on a Tear
When salesforce.com invested in FinancialForce a few years ago, there was keen interest in how this would help the company grow. There’s never been much clarity around those numbers since the parent company of FinancialForce, Unit4, doesn’t break out the individual numbers of operating divisions. That is a bit clearer now since in its last reporting period, [...]
Clown Computing–Entertaining and Attention Grabbing but a Flawed Thesis
Recently I attended Webstock, a conference in Wellington, New Zealand that is well known for bringing together technology, design and general brain stimulation. It was a great event, with some awesome speakers but one presentation, by Jason Scott, part of an activist preservationist group Archive Team, kind of stuck in my craw. In his presentation, [...]
Book Review–Bank 3.0
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, talking with and sometimes consulting to organizations in what I think of as traditional sectors about how the rise of a new way of doing business, of communicating and of personalization affects them. From telecommunications carriers to airlines, from retail to banking there is a number of [...]
Celebrity Engineers–Software’s Equivalent of Arts Patronage
Back in the days gone by, if you were part of the landed gentry, lording over your landholdings and the common folk who lived on said land, you’d look to becoming a patron of the arts as a way to ensure your name would live on after your death. While perhaps not a particularly sound [...]
The Future of Organizations, The Future of Technology
While attending HP’s Discover event (disclosure – HP covered some of my expenses for attending the event) in Frankfurt in December I was invited to take part in an interview alongside fellow Antipodean Paul Muller. The interview started off with Paul Muller explaining what he does in terms of looking at the macro trends impacting [...]
Dropbox Listens to the Criticism–Starts to Mature Corporate Product
I’ve been a harsh critic of Dropbox in the past – mostly because I feel they lack maturity – both as a company and as a product – and this lack of maturity is a real risk for enterprise customers using their product. It seems Dropbox has been listening to the criticism that myself and [...]
ComodIT–IT Automation as a Service
I’m always interested to speak with companies trying to build innovative solutions outside of the US. Despite living away from the epicenter of technology myself, all to often I find myself displaying a Valley-centric perspective on companies and the solutions they bring to market. It’s good for all of us
Dell Boomi Announces New Milestones and Partnerships
Only days after the announcement that Dell was going to return to private ownership, Dell subsidiary Boomi has come out with some news about its integration platform This is really timely given the near universal acknowledgement that software lies at the core of Dell’s future (more on this in a later post) and that it [...]
