Some Thoughts about Selling at Startups
Many MBA programs still cater too much to the needs of large, corporate management jobs or prepare students to enter big consulting companies or investments banks. If you haven’t read Adam Lashinsky’s awesome new book about Apple, you should. It takes on many of the lessons MBA programs and Corporate America have been teaching about [...]
The Risks of “Gamification” for the Enterprise
This post was inspired by a discussion I had with Bert Sandie who is the Director of Technical Excellence at Electronic Arts. It seems as though nowadays everyone is talking about “gamification” for the enterprise. For those of you not familiar with the concept, gamification is all around taking game mechanics and concepts and applying [...]
Why API’s suck, and what they lack
The Social Media Movement is slowly moving towards monetisation. Social Business, yes even Social Enterprise, is neigh. Infographics bite the dust in an ever-increasing frenzy to prove that social is here to stay, to rule, to conquer the world! And as yet another evidence of that, API’s are brought forward – by the hundreds, no [...]
Wrapped Up @ The Fort of Awesome, on to the Iron Foundry, and new Tiers…
New update and bits coming up in the near term. I wrapped up my work with AppFog’s Fort of Awesome and am now putting together blog articles & technical material for New Relic these days. They’re an extremely great company with an absolutely stellar team. However you may be asking, “Adron, YOU WRITE CODE ALL [...]
Is Multi-Currency Actually Important for SMBs?
Of late there has been a bunch of discussion about whether or not multi-currency functionality is important for SMBs. Some commentators came to this conversation from the perspective that if SaaS accounting vendors want to achieve scale, they have to provide for multi-currency. In a post discussing this AccMan says that; As things stand today, [...]
Google Apps Introduces Vault–Enterprise Will Love This
One of the barriers that people put up against using Google Apps within enterprise is the apparent lack of robust functionality that the largest enterprises require. A big part of this lacking functionality lies in the e-discovery of documents, the ability to apply governance to information assets and to archive and manage those assets. Especially [...]
With Box OneCloud, Organizations Can Embrace Both BYOD And BYOA
Box (previous CloudAve coverage), the enterprise software company formerly known as Box.net, yesterday announced Box OneCloud, their enterprise grade cloud platform to unify business information. With this announcement, they solved a major pain point experienced by the business users. They have also added some social features which will hep them fend off the competition from [...]
SnapLogic Adds Monitoring to Integration
Application integration in a cloudy world is an important and often forgotten area that I am predicting will see significant movement in the months ahead. One of the long standing providers in the field who still remains independent (after Dell’s purchase of Boomi and IBM’s purchase of CastIron) is SnapLogic (more on them here) who [...]
dotCloud Ramps Up Their Offering
dotCloud, San Francisco based platform services company letting you build your own platform stack across three data centers, yesterday announced that they are ramping up their platform stack support with support for web sockets, MongoDB 2.0 and vertical scaling. After being relatively quiet for sometime (at least, I didn’t hear much about them), they are [...]
The Futility of Meaningless Business to Business Surveys
Some of you might know that I run my own company, and we have Amazon.com as an outlet for our awesome products. In 2011 we decided early on that we wanted to use Amazon-New-Detail-Page (Photo credit: kokogiak) FBA, Fulfillment By Amazon for our products that were top selling to help customers who were upset about [...]
Cloud’s Secret Sauce–Zendesk Delivers Best Practice Analytics and Customer Satisfaction Data
I’ve long said that one of the key benefits of cloud applications is the ability of vendors to aggregate and anonymize data from their users, and to offer this anonymized aggregated data back to users who can then derive insights from comparisons between themselves and other vendors. It’s an area fraught with concerns about commercial [...]
On Trial Periods for SaaS Companies–Is Shorter Better?
Recently KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson made the decision to reduce the trial periods offered on his product from 60 days down to 14. In blogging about this change, Jackson explained the decision saying; We analysed our trial data and found that the vast majority of people who never converted from free trial to paid-up had [...]
Morphlabs Embraces SSDs
Morphlabs (previous CloudAve coverage), the company offering converged infrastructure solutions to enterprises, today announced that they are using Dell Technology to offer fully Solid State Drive technology based cloud solution. Morphlabs’ mCloud Data Center Unit (DCU) will be powered by the Dell PowerEdge C portfolio, the hyperscale server line developed by the Dell Data Center Solutions [...]
80-20: the deadly cause of IT project failure
There seems to be a rush of IT failure topics these days, all trying to find the Holy Grail of project failure. While I hold that this is a world of AND and AND, not OR and OR, I do see a major cause for project failure for the last decade: shifting from serial processing [...]
The Cost of a Disengaged Employee
I’ve had a lot of interesting discussions lately around employee collaboration and one of the topics I’ve been having conversations around is employee engagement. Now before I go into more detail I want to stress that engagement in this case doesn’t refer to activity on a platform such as submitting ideas, commenting, sharing status updates [...]
