Oracle Buys RightNow
Last month it was Salesforce buying customer support solution Assistly. This month it’s Oracle buying RightNow, a more mature, but similarly positioned player. The deal, worth around the $1.5B mark, fills the void that Oracle had in terms of customer-facing engagement tools. While Oracle does have CRM on-demand, this acquisition
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 [...]
MindTouch and Zendesk Partner To Take Customer Service To The Next Level
Image via Wikipedia MindTouch (previous CloudAve coverage), the provider of Help 2.0 solutions, and Zendesk (previous CloudAve coverage), SaaS helpdesk provider, joined hands together to announce a product which will bring MindTouch’s social knowledge base solution to Zendesk customers for free. This will help businesses offer an even more satisfying customer service experience for their [...]
Zoho Support: A Step Towards A More Integrated Suite
Zoho (CloudAve sponsor since beginning. See past CloudAve coverage of Zoho related news here) last week announced that they are releasing Zoho Support, a customer care solution integrated with their existing business suite. This is one of the applications long sought out by Zoho customers (Accounting app is another one I could think off) and [...]
Crowdsourcing for the Stars
I posted late last year about how Zendesk (more on them here) had crowdsourced the translation of their application into different languages. At the time CEO Mikkel Svane commented that; Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already [...]
IT Management Made Simple With Zendesk And GroundWork Open Source
Image via CrunchBase Zendesk (see Ben’s previous coverage of Zendesk at Cloud Ave), an elegant and simple on-demand helpdesk tool, is now bundled with GroundWork Open Source (GWOS), a network monitoring appliance built on top of Nagios, to offer an enterprise ready IT Management tool. Enterprises are still reluctant to embrace SaaS wholeheartedly. However, we [...]
Admit Your Frailty and People Will Respect You
So Zendesk (more on them here) had a bad day. Their Worst Day Ever. CEO Mikkel Svane’s face paints a picture: To quote from his post: …a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped [...]
T-Shirt Friday #30 – Zendesk #3
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
T-Shirt Friday #25 – Atlassian #2
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
Mixing SaaS and OpenSource, A Case Study…
One of my favorite posts was written over two years ago, back when I was still trying to tie down this SaaS thing. In my post I called for an approach by SaaS vendors to recreate parts of the OpenSource ethos in order to build their customer base and even their product. I said in [...]
BMC Reaches for the Cloud With a New Service Desk Express Offering
A guest post from Rhett Glauser, Service-now.com director of communications. Rhett has spent a decade talking and writing about the IT management industry from the perspective of companies like Service-now.com, Symantec, Altiris and Lineo. These days he spends most of his time communicating the benefits of modern IT service management applications, software-as-a-service, and IT best [...]
T-Shirt Friday #15 – Zendesk (#2)
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
A TechCrunch Mention Isn't a Go-To-Market Strategy (Except When It Is)
First a disclaimer – this post isn’t intended in any way to start a flame war with the mega blogs out there. Hell, in the past I’ve written for ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a good buddy of mine (he must be, we’re Facebook friends!) Rather it’s a plea for startups to really [...]
YouCalc for Zendesk, Analytical View of Helpdesk Data
I’ve written many times in the past about Zendesk (see here) and have also written about YouCalc. These two companies have much in common, YouCalc founder Rasmus Madsen was actually part of an early “friends and family” funding round for Zendesk, they’re both from Denmark (although Zendesk is now based in San Francisco) and they [...]
Zendesk Scores Series B Funding and Ditches Freemium
I’m a big fan of both the Zendesk product offering, and the company. I’ve spent a significant amount of time with the Zendesk crew, written about them since the very early days and had something of an inside view of what makes them tick. In an industry that seems sadly full of wannabe prima donnas, [...]
