Loss Of Control And Transparency In The Cloud Era
One of the biggest worries organizations have about cloud computing is the unexpected outages and the impact of associated disruptions. In fact, some of the traditional vendors use this very issue to push FUD among their customers so that they can lock them in for the foreseeable future. Similarly, if anyone evangelizing cloud tells you [...]
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 [...]
How does open source affect company culture?
An open source company is naturally a company that produces open source code for others to consume. But how does the notion of producing software code in the open affect company culture?
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Rethinking the Technology & IT Analyst Industry
(Guest post by Zia Yusuf, CEO, Streetline, formerly Executive Vice President, SAP) Over my last twelve years working as a senior executive in the technology industry I have had an opportunity to engage with a broad section of technology and IT analysts and researchers – both from established firms (eg. Gartner, Forrester etc.), smaller more [...]
Firehost Gives Customers A Peep Into Their Security
Firehost (see previous CloudAve coverage), the managed hosting provider with strong focus on security, today announced a new feature called “Security View”, available through the customer portal, which will give them a first hand view on how the company blocks hack attacks on the servers and applications. This allows the customers to gain better visibility [...]
Did 37Signals Increase BaseCamp Price or Not? The Backdoor Experiment.
There’s a debate going on about 37Signal’s “hidden” “unannounced” price increase of their popular Basecamp service. Apparently most of the uproar wasn’t so much due to the price hike itself, but the fact that it happened without any announcement. Cinovate Cinovate Cloud Inn. Why did 37 Signal’s Basecamp price double unannounced? http://bit.ly/bLan2a Contact Cinovate for [...]
10 Tips to boost SaaS customer conversion
@DaveMcClure gave a great keynote recently at #echelon2010, and he emphasized a selective focus on critical metrics to drive your business. This post is all about improving conversion (customer activation) rates for SaaS companies, suggesting 10 areas where things often go wrong. If you are a SaaS company, I expect this is one of your [...]
Google Dashboard – It Is Like Having Your FBI File
Google today announced the release of Google Dashboard, an interface from which you can essentially manage your life Google life. According to Google, this offers more control to users In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, [...]
Demand Transparency
Last week saw the emergence of some news that got the usual critics of cloud computing ecstatic about another chance to call bluff on anything cloud. The first one was an extended outage of the bitbucket service hosted on Amazon EC2 and the other one is the lost data on T-Mobile sidekick. We could make [...]
Not so Nameless or Faceless
Image by ajstarks via Flickr Louis Gray makes some interesting observations in the “Era of Faceless Giant Corporations is Over” on his blog. What makes this interesting one simple statement of intent, which is to be more cautious when dealing with companies and saying things out loud. While we can all joke about the “oh [...]
Just How Transparent Can (Should) Your Website Be?
I’ve just finished reading Jevon’s post on the Dachis Group’s new website (Jevon is a fellow Enterprise Irregular and Social Media Maven) – here’s the interesting part: The new site has the beginnings of some new ideas for how our company will grow as a Social Business. If you go to the front page of [...]
Forbes Gaffe: Prints Private Chat Between AP Reporters. How to Correct Online Publications.
The Forbes Gaffe Ok, now that I got your attention with the title, this is about more than Forbes’ Royal Gaffe. But first things first: Forbes mistakenly printed a “story”, (update: original deleted, see saved copy) which isn’t a story but private chat between two AP reporters, and should not have been published at all [...]
Yes, I Like Wine Tasting, but Hate Bait-and-Switch
The title of the email was appealing: You’re Invited to a Wine Tasting at the Ritz Carlton But then inside the email: Harness the Power of Virtualization: From Datacenter to Desktop Tuesday, October 6 Ritz Carlton San Francisco San Francisco, CA Oops.. no, thanks. Even though the event site talks about an “exclusive executive briefing [...]
Salesforce.com: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
Is Salesforce.com’s glass for SMBs half full (of lemonade) or half empty? I borrowed the lemonade metaphor from Venturebeat’s post announcing Salesforce.com’s new Contact Manager offering for (very) small businesses. On second thought we should use orange juice as a metaphor – as in disappearing orange juice, by Tropicana which offers less juice in a [...]
The Importance of Psychological Currency: Connecting Mind To Enterprise (Part 2)
Thinking about how people work in today’s enterprise reminds me of the movie Being John Malkovich. You know what I’m talking about – it’s like the low-ceiling offices on floor 7½ of the Mertin Flemmer building in New York City. The ceiling is all of 4 1/2 feet high, and they have to emergency-stop the [...]
