A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.
We’re Still Waiting for a Cloud That Just Works
SaaS entrepreneurs shouldn’t need a TechOps team until they hit $20m in revenue. I’m willing to write a piece of the Series A check to whoever can really fully solve this problem so that TechOps becomes a side issue.
And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
OneLogin Launches Cross-Application Search
The announcement by Salesforce a few weeks ago that it was moving into the enterprise Single Sign on (SSO) space was both an excellent validation that sso across cloud and on-premise applications is needed, but also a rude awakening to the existing independent SSO vendors like OneLogin and Okta. While
Mobile First? The Desktop Still Has Three Good Years Left in It in SaaS
“Mobile First.” OK, we all get it. Look what’s happening on Facebook, as the majority of its usage has rapidly transitioned to mobile, throwing at least a wrench into its browser-based ad model for the time being. Google, Zynga, etc. the impact is huge and clear. Apple seems to be the only one in consumer [...]
Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
The thing is, what you really have to ask yourself, if you are growing less than 100-150% YoY — all the way to $100m in ARR — is the market just too small? Or if not — am I just not well enough positioned in the market?
Dreamforce, BoxWorks, Arse-Kissing, and Behavioral vs. Attitudinal Loyalty
Not tooo long ago, I was meeting with one of EchoSign’s largest customers. As I was coming, someone else was leaving – Marc Benioff. He’d come (flying private I assume, and possibly straight from Hawaii) to … kiss the customer’s arse, as near as I could tell. The customer already had thousands and thousands of [...]
Box Counters the Threat of ChatterBox–The Switzerland of Content Collaboration
When Salesforce announced their ChatterBox content collaboration solutions a couple of weeks ago, the one vendor most impacted by the news was Box – partly because they’d previously been an important partner of Salesforce, but also because the announcement cut off some of Box’s oxygen, especially inside companies who are
Nothing Stops the Box Bunny
OK, so I ‘m abandoning my pictorial post schedule, as Box-mania just broke out, and I feel compelled to jump in. But the skipped NetSuite post is coming soon… I’ve been following Box longer than probably most observers and some of the old memories are worth sharing – from an admittedly subjective point of view. [...]
Cloud Case Study–BlueWolf
While at DreamForce recently I took the opportunity to sit down and talk with BlueWolf a business process and strategy consultancy that does a lot of work with mid sized and enterprise customers helping them move their IT to a more agile way of doing things. BlueWolf has some 3000 customers across tech, financial services [...]
If Developers are the new Kingmakers–Salesforce is Starting to Own the Castle
I’ve been attending Salesforce’s user conference now for a few years and one thing that’s always been a little awkward is the fact that Salesforce has always tried to make the event meaningful for developers but has generally created a kind of Frankenstein beast where suited business types get highbrow in the main conference whilst [...]
A Pictorial Tale of Two Conferences (and more)
Recently I’ve attended two conferences two weeks apart in San Francisco, and the difference in style is shocking. One did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick:-) The other a decidedly more “closed” traditional corporate conference, so much so, that fellow commentators actually compared it [...]
BoxWorks 2012–Predictions and Prognostications
Next week sees me in San Francisco for the annual Box user conference, it’s an interesting time for the company, only a couple of weeks ago Salesforce stole some of their thunder by announcing a file sync and collaboration tool. BoxWorks is an opportunity for the company to fight back, and for CEO Aaron Levie [...]
MindTouch Delivers Knowledge Base for Salesforce Customers
MindTouch is one of the early leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space –their CEO, Aaron Fulkerson was a regular attendee on the conference circuit. Over the last couple of years however, MindTouch has gone pretty silent as market conditions and heightened competition caused them to disappear from view. I bumped into Fulkerson in San Diego [...]
Salesforce.com: Pushing social business into the mainstream
Dreamforce was a huge cloud and social enterprise success, but salesforce.com still has challenges ahead.
