Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the [...]
Ignoring that harmless looking “Force Majeure” clause in your cloud services provider agreement?
“Force Majeure” – An event that is a result of the elements of nature, as opposed to one caused by human behavior. This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, [...]
StitchLabs–Solving SMBs Inventory Woes
Many readers know that outside of technology, I own a business that manufactures apparel and other products and sells them both online and through retail outlets. Having been involved in that business for 17 or so years, I’ve had first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to run a tightly integrated operation with e-commerce, [...]
ComodIT–IT Automation as a Service
I’m always interested to speak with companies trying to build innovative solutions outside of the US. Despite living away from the epicenter of technology myself, all to often I find myself displaying a Valley-centric perspective on companies and the solutions they bring to market. It’s good for all of us
Churn and SaaS
SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the [...]
Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in [...]
What is MRR Churn? | SaaS Metrics FAQs Part 2
Why measure SaaS MRR churn? Show me the money! SaaS MRR churn is an important SaaS metric that measures the financial impact of churn. While customer churn is an important operational metric, CFOs always prefer MRR churn. In this second SaaS Metrics FAQs article, I explore ways to analyze SaaS MRR churn.
Two SaaS Metrics That Actually Don’t Matter That Much: Churn and Sales Cycles
Ok, I know the title sounds a bit controversial, but bear with me, it’s not. Metrics are critical in SaaS, and you need to track them fastidiously. But it’s also important to focus on the right metrics, at the right stage, and not obsess about the less important ones at the wrong times. And I’m [...]
Saasu Drops Freemium–Some Users Balk at the Change
On New Years Eve, while on a holiday skiing trip in the French Alps, expat Aussie and Clouderati ringleader Sam Johnston wrote a series of tweets exclaiming his anger about a change that cloud accounting vendor Saasu had made to its terms and conditions. earlier this year, a Saasu blog post advised customers that it [...]
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 [...]
Drivers for Cloud Adoption–CIO Research
Interesting survey results just released that indicate cost isn’t the highest factor in cloud adoption (yay – at last people are talking more about non-cost impacts of cloud) – Respondents believe compliance requirements, value and competitive advantage are the key drivers for cloud adoption. The survey polled 330 global CIOs
Want to Understand SaaS? If Nothing Else — Understand That It Compounds
If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different. The reasons are many, but I think they can almost all be summed up in one key factor: SaaS compounds. What does this mean, that SaaS compounds? It means it’s really, really hard to get revenues going. You close a customer for $120 in annualized [...]
MuleSoft Launches API Repository and Community Resource
MuleSoft, the integration platform for both SaaS and on-premise applications, is today announcing the launch of APIhub, a public repository and community resource for API discovery. The idea of the hub is to give both application developers, and enterprise customers the ability to find and use a wide selection of
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 [...]
If You Don’t Have a Truly Great Founding Team, Just Take a Pause. Don’t Start Your Start-Up Yet.
Ok I know this post and its title seems like the most obvious thing in the world. But empirically, I can tell you isn’t. Over the past 12 months, I’ve met with friends/colleagues/partners/ex-customers who are total rockstars and working on starting a company. I mean, total rockstars. (Yes, I know that’s an abused team). What [...]
