Wave Goes Payroll
I’ve written before about Wave Accounting, a vendor that is hoping to turn SMB accounting software on its head by delivering a product at a zero price point and monetizing through the smart utilization of aggregate data. The jury is out as to SMBs appetite for their data being used, and whether it is viable [...]
Salesforce Acquires Assistly… Anyone Else See a Disconnect?
News that salesforce has acquired service desk vendor Assistly in a move that many of us had an inkling about well before DreamForce – it seems that dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s of he deal saw it closing after the event. Assistly is a young company that is squarely positioned to compete with [...]
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
Zoho Rounds Out Small Business Suite with Accounting App–Zoho Books
This morning Zoho, known for SMB focused SaaS offerings in the areas of productivity, collaboration, business processes launched an Accounting app: Zoho Books. I typically don’t do detailed product reviews, when I see the first good ones, will link to them – just a few points here and then let’s discuss how it rounds out [...]
A Small Business Perspective on the Value of Salesforce Chatter
For those of you not familiar with Chatter, it’s a relatively new product that Salesforce (CRM vendor) released and it’s basically designed to allow for more efficient communication within your organization. It’s a bit like Facebook but for the enterprise. I want to note that this post isn’t about Salesforce as a whole, but specifically [...]
Syncplicity Enhances Their Business Edition To Compete Harder In The Crowded Marketplace
Syncplicity (see previous CloudAve coverage), the cloud based file storage and management company, yesterday announced the release of additional features for their Business Edition. This will help them compete harder with services like Sugarsync, Box.Net, etc. in the business space. With this release, Syncplicity makes it clear that they want to target the corporate accounts. [...]
NetSuite Fights Hairball Epidemic with New Release and Edgy Marketing Campaign
NetSuite’s marketing team has been known for their edginess, starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAP’s annual conference to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs. Windows. Today they are doing it again, by establishing the Hairball Institute for Business: (The [...]
Open Source And Cloud Computing: How Bitnami Helps Launch Open Source Apps On EC2 In 2 Minutes
When Amazon announced the release of Amazon Micro Instances, I was excited about how useful it will be for SMBs. Amazon Micro Instances + Open Source software solves one of the problems faced by SMBs. Some pundits outright dismissed the possibility of using Micro Instances for web hosting. Even though I agree that Micro Instances [...]
Telcos Could Be The Future Enterprise Software Vendors For Small Businesses
Having worked on enterprise software product and go-to-market strategy for SMB (small and medium businesses), I can tell you that these are the most difficult customers to reach to, especially the S in SMB. It’s an asymmetric non-homogeneous market f…
Open Source And Cloud Computing: Amazon Micro Instances Can Be Boon To SMBs
Earlier today, I wrote about Amazon’s announcement on the availability of the new Micro Instances and their aggressive pricing strategy. The surprising factor for me is their competitive pricing. Their on-demand instance is only 2 cents per hour for Linux and 3 cents per hour for Windows. A 24/7 usage of a Linux Micro Instance [...]
Best meeting ever with a banker and it was still no sale
Sometimes you decide that you really do want to continue to grow your company beyond cash flow so you decide you want to go talk to a banker and see what all they would be interested in loaning money and providing deeper banking services than you have now. I did not want a traditional bank [...]
SAP Business ByDesign Video – Plain and Simple, Making Fun of …Wow, ERP!
We’re just having an intense internal debate in the Enterprise Irregulars group whether SAP’s Business ByDesign (ByD) is late to the market and what it all means, when hot off the press here’s a promotional video, that’s not so much ByD advertising but a SMB / SME SaaS 101, and a very good one at [...]
NetSuite, Manufacturing, Ecosystems and a Better Way to Compete
We’ve covered NetSuite substentially @ CloudAve – to the point that I’ve run into trouble with my title: I already used NetSuite vs SAP … Round #n. A Game Changer? so what should I call this one? NetSuitevs SAP Round #n+1? All right, let’s get serious: NetSuite launched a Manufacturing Edition today. Dennis Howlett has [...]
And Who Said SaaS Wasn’t Customizable? – NetSuite Rewrites the Rules and Embraces Design Thinking in the process
I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about moving to SaaS an often I hear their concerns around the apparent lack of flexibility that SaaS apps give them. In the broader context this argument speaks to the points raised by Dennis Howlett in his recent post about design thinking as it relates to [...]
The FourSquare Spy Guide – Customer Dashboards for SMB 2.0
I’ve been writing about FourSquare for business recently by promoting the potential benefits to businesses with customer foot traffic. Now with their release of a Customer Dashboard for businesses, they’ve taken the concept of social location-based networking to a whole new level. A level that businesses need to understand as it will significantly impact their [...]
