Making Sense of Color after Meraki, and Going Big
I had a draft post I’d written weeks ago entitled something like “Color: Just an Enormously Large Seed Round Gone Horribly Wrong”, or something like that. Which I guess it was — $41,000,000 to build an iOS app with no revenue that no one ever used. But it wasn’t that interesting, that post/story, so I [...]
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 [...]
Yes, You Can Measure Everything. Marketing, PR, Dev, Lead Efficiency. Do It.
One thing so many people tell you, in small and big companies alike (especially the big ones), is “you can’t measure [XXX]“. PR firms always tell how you can’t measure the value of press. Engineers tell you that you can’t measure development, it’s a soft science. Corporate marketers tell you that you can’t measure the [...]
Why Cyber Monday’s Days Are Just Getting Started
We recently celebrated two of the busiest shopping days of the year here in the U.S., Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) where millions of people flock to stores to find great deals, and Cyber Monday where millions of shoppers find amazing prices online. IBM stated that sales on Cyber Monday we’re up “30.3% from [...]
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.
Eucalyptus’ AWS Bet
Yesterday Eucalyptus announced the new version of their software and, in the process, more closely aligned with AWS. It is not surprising given the ground realities of cloud infrastructure market. I would even argue that it is a smart bet by Eucalyptus which could help them as enterprises are seriously considering AWS off late. Before [...]
The Perils and Pitfalls of the “Been There, Done That” VP: Posers and Mercenaries
Basically all of the SaaS CEOs/founders I know of have made at least one terrible VP+ level hire. Sometimes it’s VP Sales (OK, often, this is the most common mishire — another post here on what a really great VPS can do for you, and how a poor one can wreck your company, coming).
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 [...]
Don’t Hire CEOs, Architects, Gamers, or Dualies
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to recruit a lot of types of folks over the years where my domain knowledge was limited. I’ve had to recruit Ph.Ds. from various domains including particle physics. Front-end, mid-end, back-end engineers of all sorts and types. Sales managers back when I never managed sales. Internet marketers [...]
RIM:Back From the Brink?
I am a sucker for the underdog. I love the battle, the strategy, the market dynamics. The ‘We’re Not Number One, So We Try Harder’ mentality. I think that’s why I was originally attracted to Android. I saw the potential of the OS early in the game (bought the first Android phone). I’ve been an [...]
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 [...]
CloudFoundry Core May Not Be Important But CloudFoundry Is Important
Two weeks back I wrote a post arguing that CloudFoundry Core is not important. I had argued that even though CloudFoundry Core is done with an intention to make application portability seamless across various CloudFoundry deployments, the business considerations of PaaS vendors in the ecosystem will ensure that application portability is not a given. The [...]
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 [...]
Voice in the Clouds
The voice in the cloud is not the creator of the universe, but rather some 800 service providers after your wallet. And they are getting it. Hosted voice and UCaaS is growing at an impressive clip. The premise vendors can’t ignore it any more. While Avaya, for example, touts that it grew IP office sales 46 percent [...]
SITREP – Stoking Iron Foundry, Thor Hammering & Joining… ?
What have I been up to? Here’s a quick recap. You may want to get involved with some of these projects! Iron Foundry & Tier 3 Web Fabric Back when I left the kick ass team at Russell Investments in Seattle I stepped directly to bat as team lead at Tier 3. My job, get a [...]
