Empathize Not Sympathize
Many enterprise software vendors sympathize. “We know it’s a bad experience” or “We will fix the usability.” One of the reasons the software is not usable is because the makers never had any empathy for the end users who would use it. In many cases the makers didn’t even know who their end users were; [...]
More Proof That Shadow IT is a Growing Issue
When talking with organizations about how the cloud can help them, I’m often told that cloud has no place in their organization and they’re not using it in any way, shape or form. They also point to the perceived security risks that cloud brings as their #1 reason for not using any flavor of cloud. [...]
Overcoming the Perils of Licensing with CiRBA
The efficiency that virtualization brings is good and all, but there still exists issues around licensing costs. Essentially having a virtualization product, and making licensing changes to optimize a customer’s costs are two very different things. CiRBA, a provider of capacity control software, aims to help with this problem with
Finding opportunities to unseat incumbents
On Quora, this question was asked: Competition: How do you assess the value of a new product or service vs an incumbent’s? Is there a starting set of criteria? eg. price, quantity provided, ease of use, breadth and so on. I’m thinking specifically of a product to supply financial news and information and prices. What [...]
Churn and SaaS
SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the [...]
From Initial Traction to Initial Scale (~$10M in ARR): The Hardest Phase. But — The Cavalry is Coming.
The hardest phase of SaaS, at least for the founders, is the phase from Initial Traction ($1-$2m in ARR + 100% YoY growth + 50% of new customers from zero-cost marketing) to the next phase — Initial Scale. Inevitability in SaaS comes around $10m in ARR, plus or minus. Once you hit this point, [...]
The Dreamliner and Telecom
A couple of months ago I wrote a series of critical articles on the brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Yes, a bit off topic from Telecom, but a great lesson on corporate and governmental politics, massive engineering projects, and spin. None of those things are far from the world of Telecom. Besides, we are all geeks [...]
Goodbye Jody.
Jody. You’re gone too early. We still had so many more times to spend together. I loved this image I saw posted by Andy Rankin. Because this is the one word that was not in your vocabulary. And it was the first word I muttered when I heard the news tonight. I remember when we [...]
Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in [...]
VMware, Puppet Labs and an Infrastructure Future
News recently that VMware, fresh from spinning out most of its developer focused non-virtualization assets in the Pivotal Initiative, has put a huge $30M finding into Puppet Labs. As part of the deal, VMware and Puppet will team up to produce a new IT management solution for VMware customers to use that leverages the automation [...]
ORMs Suck, I’m Asking & I’m Telling
Here’s a thing that’s come up already. ORMs, or Object Relational Mapper, are a RDBMS based thing for devs that want, in essence a statically typed object to deal with when writing code (yes, I know there’s a ton of other things an ORM can do or be used for, but I’m going with a [...]
How to Select Enterprise Collaboration Vendors
Towards the end of last year I wrote a post on the eight variables to evaluate enterprise collaboration vendors which you should read before continuing with this post. Today I want the vendor evaluation discussion a bit further with something that I actually wrote for CMSWire a few weeks ago on scoring and comparing vendors. Before we get [...]
Should You Bother Targeting the Tech Blogs for Your PR Campaigns?
I’ve started a recent series on PR at startups since I get asked for advice on this topic so often. I will put the full list of posts here. The start of this series was, Should Your Startup Announce Funding? 6 or 7 years ago when TechCrunch was at its peak market share (they are still [...]
New HP Printer Google Hack via Port3000
New HP Printer Google Hack via Port3000 Blogger Adam Howard over at Port3000 has found a very cool new Google Hack for finding unsecured HP Printers. A lot of these time out, but for those that work, the day gets interesting. You do need Java to make the admin screen work, and these seem to [...]
Should Startups Announce Their Funding?
Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. I think many board members (including VCs) were trained 10+ years ago when life was very different and their advice often comes from an outdated lens. One of [...]
