What Makes Cloud Transformation So Hard?
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products [...]
New Meme: Business Users Are The IT
For the past two years, I have been advocating PaaS as the future of cloud services and how developers are the face of the IT in the PaaS era. I have long argued that as PaaS takes over the IT infrastructure in the organizations, we will see a shift in who holds the key to [...]
Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in SaaS
IMHO, most SaaS CEOs/founders aren’t Killers. They can’t be. They’re Builders. In fact, the two jobs of a founder/CEO are antithetically opposed to zero-sum and attack thinking. First, at a strategic level, the founder/CEO has to see the future, a positive future, that is 100x bigger than today. Focused on putting the internal pieces together [...]
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, [...]
What’s Cloud Management ?
This last year has been immensely interesting for me as I watched the shaky cloud market mature. The change in people’s state of mind was rapid. The discussion advanced quickly from “the cloud will not prosper” to “Can we trust its security?”, and on to the current mood – “the cloud is here to stay”. [...]
Tier 3 Brings Out The Heavy Guns!
There are cloud offerings and then there are cloud offerings. As of today, Tier 3 just loaded up some big guns. Over the years Tier 3 has provided an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play using various geographically located data-centers with high level disaster recovery, high availability (99.999%), utility compute, and high speed storage to [...]
Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs
I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may [...]
Google Says Google+ Is Not Ready For Brands
Ever since Google+ was launched, I am playing around with it both for personal use as well as for professional use. I see Google+ eventually replacing Facebook for me (provided I convince my family and friends to start using Google+ and their throttling of invites is not helping my cause) on the personal side. Already, [...]
8 Questions to Help Decide if You Should be Raising Money Now
A year ago I blogged about one of my most common mantras that applies to sales, biz dev & fund raising alike: “Time is the Enemy of all Deals.” When times are really good for fund raising many teams delay to maximize their valuation. Sometimes this pays off, other times it doesn’t. So how should [...]
Why is Quora Censoring our Questions and Answers?
Answer: They are too smart for their own good and not smart enough for everyone else’s. Molly Ivins once quipped, “The strongest human emotion is neither love nor hate. It is one person’s desire to f#ck with another person’s copy” Well we’re not talking Farenheit 451, more like a quarter of that temperature but complaints [...]
Cloud Computing Through the Eyes of 10-year-olds
Oh, the typewriter. Is it: A business machine? A museum artifact? If you are my generation, there was a time when you called it a business machine. You typed letters (OK, perhaps your assistant did), folded them, stuck them in envelopes, mailed them and waited a few weeks for the response. Yes, it was possible [...]
An Entrepreneur’s Growth Equity Conundrum: Should I sell stock or sell growth?
Two times in the past year, I’ve been close to making an investment in two separate micro-cap growth equity opportunities only to have the opportunity go sideways deep into the process. The two businesses share a lot in common; they are similar in size, profitability, and growth prospects. Both are capital-intensive; the first being asset [...]
This Week’s Keynote Presentations
I have often complained how much I hate sitting on panels. The reason is that conferences usually pack them up with speakers to maximize the number of high profile guests in attendance to sell more general admission tickets. So with a panel of 5-6 people and 30-45 minutes it’s hard to have a real conversation. [...]
Turn about is not fair play on the broken hiring process
We have all heard about the problems with finding the right employee for the jobs you are trying to fill. Usually from my vantage point as a hiring manager my biggest problems have been about resumes that did not make sense for the position being filled. It is very hard to go from an AA [...]
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 [...]
