Enterprise startups against the big guys: CxO Talk 7
On CxO Talk, episode 7, co-host Vala Afshar (absent this week due to travel) and I welcome venture capitalist Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos is senior managing director at Trident Capital, where he invests in late stage and growth companies, with a focus on enterprise applications. Here is the entire video conversation: The conversation starts with the venture [...]
CxO Talk: Microsoft, salesforce.com, CRM, and the science of hugging
This week’s episode of CxO Talk, with my co-host Vala Afshar, features top CRM analyst, Paul Greenberg, as our guest. Paul is widely known as the “godfather of CRM” and is a contributor to ZDNet. Here are important topics from the discussion: On Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Microsoft held its annual Convergence conference in New Orleans [...]
One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra. I believe it’s flawed. While I have some sympathy with [...]
VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND TWO … FIGHT! — VMW Conceding Impotence?
Two and a half years ago I wrote about the inevitable throwdown between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), but recently VMware’s senior leadership appeared to outright admit defeat. The message to VMware’s partners was simple: “We want to own corporate workload,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO. “We all lose if they end up in [...]
Big Data | Thinking Outside the Firewall
A few months back, Gartner placed big data at the peak of its hype cycle for cloud computing, meaning most big data products are solutions looking for a problem. I always find this bad entrepreneurial habit to be one of the most frustrating of our industry. Having recently joined Meltwater as head of marketing and [...]
Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further [...]
Chartio Supporting Salesforce–Pretty for the Enterprise
Two themes I often talk about are specific functionality from specialist vendors and delivering enterprise solutions in new and friendly ways. A good example of this I came across recently was from small company Chartio. Chartio, a Y Combinator company, touts itself as the best interface for data. Essentially it allows organizations to take data [...]
Bridging the Chasm Between IT and the Business
People go to great lengths to explain how cloud computing is democratizing IT and enabling the end-users of technology to make some decisions themselves about what they use, how they use it and how quickly they can get set up. A plethora of enterprise vendors have got their start in
Acquisition News – Cloud Sherpas Broadens the Franchise and Moves Into ITSM
I’ve been covering Cloud Sherpas since its inception – I’m particularly interested in this new breed of services brokerage that is proving successful despite deriving its revenue from a small sliver of a very small annual charge – this in comparison to the traditional on-premise world where companies enjoyed massive consulting fees for implementation project [...]
The Law of Attach Rates, And Why Partners Can’t Really Move the Needle For You (Directly)
I want to spend a little time on some learnings about Strategic Partners in SaaS. First, let me be clear — to make it in SaaS, you’re probably going to need to achieve real success with Strategic Partners. Because it takes a Village. And because your partners will likely, through integrations in particular, make your [...]
Force.com and the Uber-Democratization of Programming
In the last few weeks I’ve started to riff on James Govenor’s meme, that of developers becoming the new kingmakers. I recently wrote a post discussing what I saw happening with Salesforce – how the combination of force.com and Heroku was creating a real gravity pull for developers and that Salesforce was primed to be [...]
CloudSherpas–$40M in Funding and Another Aquisition
I’ve been following Google Apps and Salesforce reseller since it launched a few years ago – in that time I’ve seen them acquire companies globally and grow into a real force in the space. I’m always a little dubious about how much long term viability there is in a company that makes its money earning [...]
What Will Identity Look Like in the Future?
At the defrag conference recently, I took part in a few sessions that looks at the broader role of identity in a world were more and more people use cloud-based tools. One of the sessions was led by Pat Patterson, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce. In his session, Patterson drew a picture of the history [...]
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 [...]
Cloud app integration: Incredibly important, but also problematic
My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource [...]
