CRM Idol Finals – Vote Now!
Wow, these six months flew by fast. Paul Greenberg, widely recognized as Godfather of CRM launched his ambitious project, CRM Idol in April. Companies with revenues under $12M were allowed to enter, and the contents has proven very popular, the 40 Americas and 20 EMEA slots filled up fast. Paul estimates the total value of [...]
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
Sage in the Cloud, but is it too little too late?
Last week Sage, the UK’s biggest accountancy software supplier, finally released their first real online accounting solution. It looks like a proper SaaS or Cloud offering, unlike the hosted Online 50 product sold through a few resellers from 6 years ago, or their previous failed attempt of SageLive in 2009. I would argue that because [...]
Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out [...]
Best meeting ever with a banker and it was still no sale
Sometimes you decide that you really do want to continue to grow your company beyond cash flow so you decide you want to go talk to a banker and see what all they would be interested in loaning money and providing deeper banking services than you have now. I did not want a traditional bank [...]
SAP Business ByDesign Video – Plain and Simple, Making Fun of …Wow, ERP!
We’re just having an intense internal debate in the Enterprise Irregulars group whether SAP’s Business ByDesign (ByD) is late to the market and what it all means, when hot off the press here’s a promotional video, that’s not so much ByD advertising but a SMB / SME SaaS 101, and a very good one at [...]
B2B Integration, Available to the Little Guys at Last. Acquisition, funding and bootstrapping
Lots of interesting happenings in the B2B integration space – some funding, an acquisition and a little battle aiming to bootstrap its way to stardom. Recently IBM announced its acquisition of Sterling Commerce – Colleague Ray Wang does an, as-always, excellent job of giving a quick perspective. Some key points from Ray’s post: On May [...]
On Bootstrapping. And Big Bucks. And Organic Growth
Recently there have been a few posts about growth through funding and growth through organic means. Tony Hsieh from Zappos told his tale of woe about the expectations of VC’s in terms of good exits. On the other hand, Sridhar Vembu, Founder of Zoho (disclosure – Zoho is exclusive sponsor of CloudAve) wrote an excellent [...]
On Startups, and Influence, and Messaging
I’ve spent over a month in the past three in the US, split between three different trips for different events, and over this time I’ve met with dozens of startups, many of who are from outside the US and are making their first tentative forays into the US scene. I’ve had conversations with a bunch [...]
NetSuite, Manufacturing, Ecosystems and a Better Way to Compete
We’ve covered NetSuite substentially @ CloudAve – to the point that I’ve run into trouble with my title: I already used NetSuite vs SAP … Round #n. A Game Changer? so what should I call this one? NetSuitevs SAP Round #n+1? All right, let’s get serious: NetSuite launched a Manufacturing Edition today. Dennis Howlett has [...]
Integration is Good… When You Actually Do It (Part Two)
A month or so ago I wrote a post critical of the integration one vendor had made with the Google apps marketplace. Yesterday I was perusing Twitter when I came across this tweet: I’m actually a user of Xero for three of my businesses, so I was looking forward to seeing what their inclusion on [...]
A Tale of Two Generations – Sage Languishes while Financial Force Innovates
Software is undergoing a generational change – I thought I’d pull out an example to show what the old generation is doiing and contrast that to what the “cool kids” are doing. I was interested to read Dennis Howlett’s post about Sage recently. In his post Dennis reflected on the signals he’s getting from his [...]
There’s a Reason It’s Free – Get Over It…
I’ve been mulling this post around in my head for quite some time now – an eight hour flight across the great Australian Desert seemed as good a time as any to finally put pen to paper (fingers to keys?) and write this post. We’ve been hearing much lately about privacy concerns with free services [...]
NetSuite vs SAP … Round #n. A Game Changer?
In my recent Suites post I said there were exactly 1.5 (one and a half) integrated full business solutions (SaaS Suite, SaaS All-In-One, SaaS ERP, SaaS SMB ERP – take your pick or create a new one) offered as a service. The one in that equation was NetSuite, and the half is SAP’s Business ByDesign. [...]
Contextual Gadgets – ManyMoon Unlocks Google’s Value
Since the Google Apps marketplace launched, I’ve been a little disappointed at the somewhat limited integrations that have been created by apps on the marketplace. While I’d love Google to have an even richer common set of data, there was little use made of the data that is currently provided. All that is changing with [...]
