Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
OpenStack Summit – thoughts from Portland
OpenStack has come a long way since the project was first unveiled at OSCon back in 2010. This week, almost 3,000 people gathered in Portland, Oregon, to continue the job of defining, debating, developing, and delivering the code upon which the OpenStack community depends. Alongside the developers, though, there were some early signs of tangible [...]
Not quite ready to live in the cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can [...]
Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W [...]
Stop Trying to Catch Lightning in a Bottle
I’m sure you’ve all heard saying derived from Voltaire, “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” which in a way is encapsulated in the lean startup movement and the ideology of shipping a “minimum viable product” (MVP) and then learning from your customer base. Or to borrow a simple life lesson from Gretchen [...]
The Contact Center in the Sky
Hosted voice continues to grow in subscribers and scope. Many hosted providers have already expanded from dialtone to robust UC solutions, but now there seems to be a frenzy around contact center offerings. Here’s a short roundup of announcements made in just the past few weeks. Interactive Intelligence Has offered a robust contact center service [...]
In SaaS, You Have to Love the One You’re With
Recurring revenue businesses are hard. You need so many different types of people (sales, support, client success, demand gen, product, engagement, dev). The customers complain, especially your most loyal ones. You have to get on planes. You have to grovel. It’s tough. And for a lot of us … well … it just turns out [...]
How to Sell Your Roadmap Without Selling Your Soul
This is my third post in a series on Enterprise Software. In part one I covered the need for early-stage enterprise software companies to build up professional services staff to ensure successful implementation projects. This goes against the conventional wisdom of VCs. In part two I talked about how to ensure that your professional services [...]
The Trouble With Choice…
Choices, as the old British adage goes, are rather like buses – you wait patiently for one to arrive and then, annoyingly, several of them arrive at once. So true is this, that in my continued observation of our beloved tech industry, it appears to be the present day case for enterprises feeling their way [...]
Ignoring that harmless looking “Force Majeure” clause in your cloud services provider agreement?
“Force Majeure” – An event that is a result of the elements of nature, as opposed to one caused by human behavior. This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, [...]
How to Better Manage Relationships with Your VC
Just back from 2 solid weeks on the road in Boston, New York & Philly. I spent countless hours with VC firms, startups & LPs (the people who invest in VC firms). I find these trips invaluable both from a relationship-building perspective as well as stretching my mind about our industry. I ask questions, test [...]
KimDotCom
It’s very rare when an individual raises to the level that they are worth listening to. Steve Jobs was one of those people. Kim Dotcom may be another…I’m watching to see. He is certainly one of the most entertaining individuals of all time. From his hot-tub parties to his paratroopers descending from helicopters in a [...]
Why You’ll Want to Raise $100,000,000 for Your SaaS Start-Up: The Incremental Customer
With all the SaaS companies raising big, later-stage rounds these days you may wonder … why? I mean, just because you can raise $100m or whatever epic number … should you? Today, I think the answer is yes. Though perhaps not for the reasons you might think. There are a couple of standard reasons companies [...]
The Five-Step Maturity Model for Building a Collaborative Organization
In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research. The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there. [...]
Gartner: CIOs and CMOs must ‘turn sparks into flame’
In the most recent episode of CxO Talk, Vala Afshar and I asked Gartner group vice president, Mark P. McDonald, to advise CIOs who face declining IT budgets despite higher overall technology spend in their organization. Mark’s comments shed light on reformulating IT strategy to reflect changing corporate needs and the evolving relationship between the CIO and [...]
