TradeGecko–Cloud-Based SMB Inventory Launches
I’ve spent couple of decades dealing with the realities of a small business that sells physical goods. The functional requirements of these businesses are surprisingly broad but alas the budget tends to be small. I was interested then to hear from the founders of TradeGecko, a recently launched SaaS inventory
A Real Life SaaS Case Study: Eloqua. Marketo. Pardot. There Are 3 Different Paths to Success, My Young Padwan.
I don’t know about you, but I really can’t stand case studies. They always seem either contrived (forcing contrasts in companies that aren’t really there) or else too hypothetical, because we know which way things really worked out in real life (Case Study: Company A had to decide whether to do action X or Y. [...]
Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
The thing is, what you really have to ask yourself, if you are growing less than 100-150% YoY — all the way to $100m in ARR — is the market just too small? Or if not — am I just not well enough positioned in the market?
Coder’s Vacation : #RICON2012 Shreds the House!
Here I am on day #3 of my Coder’s Vacation and RICON is happening today. This is a new conference put together by the fine folks at Basho, maker of Riak (which note, is a link to the project on Github because Basho is awesome like that, they roll all open source like). However, it’s a [...]
The Best PaaS is one that is Being Used
Often I hear that the enterprise is “starting to warm up to PaaS” spoken as though adoption in the enterprise is purely a function of the customer’s readiness. Obviously an enterprise must adjust its IT world view in order to truly embrace PaaS. PaaS is at least as much a cultural change as it is [...]
Open Discussions On Open Cloud
As I go from conference to conference, I’m seeing more and more examples of people talking about the “open cloud.” Proponents talk about choice, flexibility and the inherent safety of the open cloud. Opponents, on the other hand, point to fragmentation, immaturity and concerns about anything that is available without
Dreamforce, BoxWorks, Arse-Kissing, and Behavioral vs. Attitudinal Loyalty
Not tooo long ago, I was meeting with one of EchoSign’s largest customers. As I was coming, someone else was leaving – Marc Benioff. He’d come (flying private I assume, and possibly straight from Hawaii) to … kiss the customer’s arse, as near as I could tell. The customer already had thousands and thousands of [...]
The Real Truth about SAP and SuccessFactors Integration
There is no doubt that integration between SAP and SuccessFactors is the top priority for most SAP HCM customers. Over the past month SAP has released several blog on the topic such as Integration Technology Options and Licensing Info For Customers Using SAP HCM and SuccessFactors and SAP HCM integration with SuccessFactors BizX to attempt [...]
Why Zynga was Right to Buy OMGPop and Words With Friends, And What it Means for SaaS
Zynga just keeps getting hammered. The latest was on preannouncing a big miss for Q3, and an almost complete write-off of its $183m acquisition of OMGPop, the guys behind briefly ultrapopular Draw Something. Next up may well be a complete write-down of the $200m+ for Words with Friends. The OMGPop acquisition was called “catastrophic“, for example, [...]
TIBCO’s Silver Fabric – a golden lining
I attended TIBCO’s PaaS workshop, where they showed and demoed Silver Fabric - the product that has come forth from the DataSynapse acquisition in September 2009. Erik Hageman, Mario Invernizzi and Steven van der Kroftlead the session. The location was the Radisson Blu near Schiphol, a fine location with excellent service and food & drinks. After we had [...]
Cloud Architecture And Best Of Breed
As cloud computing becomes all the more pervasive, people are rethinking the idea of buying software and hardware suites in favor of best of breed approach. In a way, cloud architecture makes it easy to avoid the integrated stack lock-in as interoperability through open APIs is taken for granted in most cases. At Boxworks 2012, [...]
B2B Social Business Bill of Rights | Don’t Get it Wrong!
Which is more important in B2B social media, social or media? For way too many B2B marketers, the answer is media, because they see social media as a marketing communications channel. It is not! Social media is a tool to energize your B2B social business network.
Box Counters the Threat of ChatterBox–The Switzerland of Content Collaboration
When Salesforce announced their ChatterBox content collaboration solutions a couple of weeks ago, the one vendor most impacted by the news was Box – partly because they’d previously been an important partner of Salesforce, but also because the announcement cut off some of Box’s oxygen, especially inside companies who are
How to Know If You Should Go for Venture Capital, In One Easy Question
Lately I’ve been meeting with a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs and I’ve realized that one byproduct of acqui-hires, incubators, seed fund explosions, etc. is that people don’t always really think about whether venture capital is a good idea for them or not. Especially with seed and Series A rounds, often no one really asks them [...]
Pre BoxWorks Thoughts: Box To Play Best Of Breed Game?
I am on the plane to attend BoxWorks 2012, the annual user conference of Box. Before hearing anything from Box, I am trying to make sense of Box’s strategy based on what I heard in the past 3 weeks during Salesforce and Tibco events. It will be interesting to hear from Box in the next [...]
