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.
Xero Raises a Truckload of Cash from US Funds
Last week the announcement came that Xero had secured a huge investment round from US venture funds Valar Ventures (backed by Facebook founder Peter Thiel) and Matrix Capital Management. I’ve spent time talking with these US investors about Xero’s prospects and areas I thought the company would need to improve
BYOD Is All About Enabling The Organization Of The Future
A while ago over on GigaOm, Matt McLarty of Layer 7 Technologies wrote an awesome post about the rise of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD. For those who haven’t spent much time thinking about the term, BYOD describes the new paradigm where individuals within an organization supply their own devices (mobile,
Heroku Joins Cloud Foundry for Multi-PaaS Support from Appsecute
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement
HP Discover Europe and the Viability of HP’s Cloud Play
I’m heading to Europe for HP’s Discover event and the conference has me thinking about the last Discover event I attended in Las Vegas earlier his year and HP’s awful few weeks around the Autonomy debacle. Alongside my theme du jour of traditional enterprises (and traditional vendors) being disrupted by new, more flexible and adaptable [...]
Apprenda Launches Hybrid Cloud Support
CloudBeat is all about customer case studies and not about vendor announcements, that said I am aware of a couple of announcements coming up today in the PaaS space.
Re:Invent Announcements–Boundary Introduces Pre-Emptive Monitoring
This week marks the first Amazon Web Services user conference. The AWS event, re:Invent, is being held in Las Vegas and given the massive awareness that AWS and its ecosystem has, we should see lots of product announcements from both Amazon themselves and ecosystem companies. First up is Boundary who is today releasing a new [...]
Reflections on BoxWorks
Having had a little while to reflect on a month that saw me attend both DreamForce and BoxWorks, I wanted to get down some thoughts on what is happening with Box, one of Silicon Valley’s current darlings. This is all the more relevant given the slightly uncomfortable position that Box found itself in after DreamWorks [...]
MasterCard Gives SMBs a Leg-Up
I’m a small and mid-sized business guy – I spend a lot of time advocating for the “little guy”. As such I’m always happy to see large companies do their bit to help SMBs compete. An interesting example of that is the MasterCard business network I recently heard about – a site that aims to [...]
On VMware’s Cloud Foundry Core and PaaS Portability
Recently VMware announced Core, a baseline test that assesses how compatible an application is to the Cloud Foundry open source release. In order to derive this compatibility rating, Core is based on a base set of components – specific versions of runtimes and components that are currently within the Core stable. Krish Subramanian has written [...]
Banking 2.0 and The Future of Bank Branches
As I’ve been talking to people around a particular interest area of mine – banking in the digital age – I’ve noticed an interesting cyclical progression. As digital technologies came to prominence in the 90’s, and banks looked for ways to cut costs and increase profits we saw a number
On Cloud Adoption
Clearly adoption of a new project is a result of myriad factors, but one of the key things to remember is that it is the non-technological human factors that are often the blockers to a successful project.
Follow Up Post – Continuuity, the PaaS for Big Data (and a $10M Series A)
When Continuuity came out of stealth recently I was a little dismissive of a press release that was full of buzzwords and lacking significant details about what they’re actually doing. To their credit the Continuuity team reached out to me and spent some time talking about what they’re seeing in the marketplace and why they [...]
FileLocker Launches By Taking a Shot at Dropbox and Box
In launching FileLocker, InfraScale CEO Ken Shaw is claiming that both DropBox and Box have been “substantially misrepresenting their capabilities when it comes to security and won’t be adopted by enterprise or Government” because of it. Those are pretty strong words…
Harvest Launches Time Tracking Platform-The Rise of the Real Time Business Application Approach
I spent some time the other day talking with Tom Mornini, founder of Boocx (more on them to come). Suffice it to say Boocx is focused on becoming the accounting platform for web developers – but platform in the true sense of the word – some core pieces of infrastructure that, via API hooks can [...]
Cloud app integration: Incredibly important, but also problematic
My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource [...]
