Uptime Offers Monitoring and Capacity Planning for VMware
As we move into a world where organizations make more and more usage of heterogeneous infrastructure resources, providers that offer those same organizations tools to ensure the performance of those resources will become more and more important. Into that role steps uptime software, an existing player in the IT systems performance space that is releasing [...]
About Cloud. And SaaS. And How “Big Apps” Will Always Stay Local
I’ve been doing this whole SaaS thing for a few years now, and fondly remember at the start when people said that only the most svelte of applications (or, more correctly, the applications with the most svelte of payloads) would ever move to the cloud. The people who used to say his would point to [...]
Totango Powers SaaS Vendor Insights
Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of advisory work with SaaS startups that are just taking their first tentative steps to market. I’ve sat in meetings at length trying to drill into sales cycles and pricing strategies and it often seems that organizations are flying a little blind without
Okta and Cloud Sherpas Partner to Accelerate GAPE Enterprise Adoption
Identity management is one of the big challenges to be faced in easing the adoption of cloud within enterprise. Okta (more on them here) and Cloud Sherpas (more on them here) have announced a partnership that is squarely aimed at easing the barriers of entry into enterprise for Google Apps. It’s quite a simple deal, [...]
Is the Stack Dead?
For years now those of us who talk Cloud on a daily basis have used variations on a triangle shape as a way to articulate what Cloud actually is and how the various services that make up Cloud can be differentiated. Traditional thinking (if one can have traditional thinking in a space as young as [...]
FreeAgent Nabs Series B
News just in that UK SaaS accounting vendor FreeAgent has nabbed GBP2M in investment from SM Trust and Torch Partners. It’s an interesting development given the other two main players in the UK market, Xero and KashFlow are both currently well funded – Xero via an IPO and some subsequent private investment and KashFlow from [...]
Salesforce for Quickbooks for Salesforce for Quickbooks….
Owning and running a bunch of small businesses, I have a real appreciation for just how important it is for SMBs to have a handle on their customers and deal flow – CRM, a concept foreign to many SMBs only a few years ago has become, with the growing importance of social media, a critical [...]
Acumatica Offers Manufacturing Software on Azure
I have a bit of a particular interest in Cloud ERP providers moving into the manufacturing space. Manufacturing is a highly complex space and one where the traditional ERP vendors have a very strong position – manufacturing relies on complex interconnected functionalities and often needs the connection of multiple organizations, locations and divisions to work [...]
Customer Self-Service | The Holy Grail of SaaS
One hundred percent customer self-service is the holy grail of SaaS. Everyone looks for it, but it is never found. Even if your product is simple enough to provide complete self-service purchase, you are unlikely to get away with complete self-service support, because you can’t hang unhappy customer’s out to dry or you will ruin [...]
Cloud Business : Some Perspectives
Cloud may mean different things to different people – It would be better to focus less on technology but devote more energy to cloud business in terms of how, where, and why these could be used to get unique value was the key message in the Cloud Business Summit, which I attended last week at [...]
SuiteWorld 2011: My Thoughts
I spent the last three days at SuiteWorld 2011, NetSuite‘s first ever user conference, attending the keynote and analyst sessions. My interest in SuiteWorld stemmed from the fact that I really wanted to see the evolution of ERP into the cloud (It should be noted that ERP is considered to be the last frontier for SaaS) [...]
The Blurry B2B Buying Process | New Breed of B2B Buyer #2
The new breed of B2B buyer remains elusive throughout the B2B buying process, blurring in and out of focus and engaging directly with sales only when there is clear value to be gained.
Gamification Of Enterprise Applications
Gamification is a hot topic for consumer applications. It is changing the way the companies, especially the start-ups, design their applications. The primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traff…
Oracle HCM (con)Fusion
Oracle HCM Fusion vs. Oracle HCM (con)Fusion – which one is it? Years of waiting, years of speculation – does the wait equal innovation? Is it real or is it still somewhat an imagination? I ask three simple, direct, important questions. Will Oracle an…
Call For Pricing
One of the most fascinating, yet relatively unchartered areas of cloud computing’s all-out assault on today’s enterprise is the complex beast that is the consumption-based pricing model. Technical, operational and of course, security issues aside, it is easy to see how the advent of pay-for-what-I-use, which is commonplace in pretty much all of the leading Public [...]
