IT survival in a digital world
Traditional IT skills center on technology and infrastructure like servers, databases, and telecom systems. Although important, these skills are rapidly becoming insufficient to meet the expectations of digital business. To be clear, traditional IT and the CIO are not going away anytime soon. Businesses and the government run on datacenters and applications that require traditional […]
Aaron Levie of Box: “If We Just Sold to Silos-in-the-Enterprise, We’d Only Be a $25,000,000 Business”
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got your back. We’ll do a series where we publish both the videos and full transcripts of all the sessions. First up is Aaron Levie of Box, where we had a wide-ranging, 45 minute deep dive on how Box scaled from $0 to $250m in ARR. As you’re reading […]
Help Us Pick 1 or 2 of the SaaStr Annual ’16 Speakers!
We’ll start to roll out the SaaStr Annual ’16 speakers in the coming weeks. It will be tough to top the ’15 speakers — from Aaron Levie to Bob Tinker, from Stewart Butterfield to David Sacks, from David Ulevitch to Parker Conrad, etc. etc. But we will find a way! We’ll also have three full […]
The Rise of the Cloud Stack
Something changed this week in the enterprise software world. In an industry known for ruthless competition, a number of players – Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and NetSuite – introduced partnerships that portend a very different future. In very un-Larry Ellison-like fashion, something akin to harmony was proposed, “when customers choose cloud applications, they expect rapid low-cost […]
Celebrity Engineers–Software’s Equivalent of Arts Patronage
Back in the days gone by, if you were part of the landed gentry, lording over your landholdings and the common folk who lived on said land, you’d look to becoming a patron of the arts as a way to ensure your name would live on after your death. While perhaps not a particularly sound […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
Box Counters Salesforce Smackdown
At TechCrunch Disrupt last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff leaked his own company’s news of a new content collaboration and sharing service dubbed ChatterBox. I’ve actually known about the product for a month or so, my sources who told me of its initial existence said that it was a direct
Huddle Picks Up Massive Series C Round
Exciting news this morning from Cloud content management and collaboration company Huddle. The UK founded but now US/UK headquartered company is this morning announcing a Series C funding round to the tune of $24M. The round takes Huddle’s funding to $40 million in the five or so years since it was launched. Huddle is an […]
On Privacy, US Legislation and Cloud Vendors
While in the US a week or two ago I spent some time talking with vendors about the security of Cloud data, in particular the impact of the DCMA and Patriot Act on non US customers of vendors. As part of my research I spent some time talking with Lindsay
What Honeycomb and Android Tablets Mean for Businesses
Google is set to announce their first tablet-oriented Android operating system, codenamed Honeycomb. At Box, we’ve been waiting for this moment since we started seeing significant traction with our apps for both the iPad and Android phones, with nearly 400,000 downloads to date. With the introduction of Honeycomb, we’ll begin working immediately on a tablet-centric version of our Box Android app.
How did we get to this point?
T-Shirt Friday #27 – box.net #2
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]
