Digital Transformation & Digital Advantage
On my flight to Boston, I came across this article titled: We Need Better Managers, Not More Technocrats from Harvard Business Review. This set me thinking for not many articles have touched the issues of digital transformation at its core, in so far what I have seen and so mentally egged me to draw this […]
AppFog Announces Java Support – What The Heck Is Happening In PaaS Space?
Yesterday AppFog (previous CloudAve coverage), formerly known as PHPFog, announced that they are adding support for Java. With the addition Java support, they can now target enterprise developers who still believe in Java over the modern day languages. Along with Java, AppFog now support PHP, Ruby and Node.js. AppFog has a dual strategy in the space. […]
NGINX Starts Commercial Operations
NGINX, the open source alternative to Apache web server, today announced their plans to start a commercial company around their software. Yesterday, they announced a $3 Million Series A funding round and how they are planning to monetize their open source software. As an analyst focussing on both open source and cloud computing, this is […]
AWS Outage & Customer Readiness
Reddit, Foursquare, EngineYard and Quora were among the many sites that went down recently due to a rather prolonged outage of Amazon’s cloud services. On Thursday April 21, When Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) went offline, it took many of its Web and database servers depending on that storage down. With Amazon working aggressively to […]
OpenERP offers Cloud Option To Their Customers
OpenERP, the open source ERP and business applications provider since 2005, today announced the new version of their offering giving customers choice between on-premise and SaaS options. The new version OpenERP v6, a major upgrade from the previous version that makes implementation and use of a comprehensive set of business applications (CRM, Purchase Management, Manufacturing, […]
The Cloud & Enterprises
This is in continuation of the previous note: Thomas Friedman makes the case that Value creation is becoming so complex that no single firm can master it without closely collaborating with a wide set of partners. John Hagel brings this up : We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage […]
XMarks May Live On
Late September, we wrote a post about the possible demise of XMarks, a browser plugin that syncs bookmarks, password, tabs, etc.. At that time XMarks announced that they are shutting down because they couldn’t find a sustainable business model to keep running the operations. This announcement brought them tremendous amount of support from the users […]
Cloud Powered Outsourcing
I wrote an Op-Ed piece for Sandhill.com on “Cloud Powered Outsourcing” available here. The focus is to highlight how services firms can leverage the disruptive nature of cloud computing to deliver new value to their enterprise clients. Thought I shall leave here a quick synopsis. In the fast changing world of technology and outsourcing, many […]
RIP XMarks – Can You Build A Viable Business Around Browser Extensions?
XMarks, formerly Foxmarks, announced shutting down of their service today. XMarks is the first plugin that brought browser bookmarks synchronization to Firefox browser in 2006. Later, they brought in password synchronization, tab synchronization, etc. to Firefox and, also, expanded to support other browsers. They tried many different options to monetize and scale but they failed […]
Making Money In Open Source: Does It Matter?
Yesterday, I attended the GigaOm bunker series on Open Source and Cloud Computing. The event had two panels, one featuring Larry Augustin of SugarCRM and Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation and the other with Joe Tobolsk, Rich Wolski, Shelton Shugar and Tom Hughes Croucher. There were some interesting discussions on both panels and an overall […]
The New Economics of Technology Startups?
I have recently been reading the book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson. Well I am not actually reading it as I find I do not have time for reading books any more. These days I do all of my “book reading” using audio books from Audible.com. I find that by […]
Cognitive Dissonance: Are you a technology or a service?
One of the trends I’ve observed over the past several years is that more and more technology entrepreneurs are starting service-delivery business. By services businesses, I’m referring to the category of businesses that some venture investors refer to as technology-enabled services (“TES”). We at Meritage prefer the term network-enabled services (“NES”), which we think more […]
Not All "Free" is Created Equal
I’m still mired in reading Chris Anderson’s latest book; “Free”. I doubt I’ll finish it. 130+ pages in, I haven’t discovered anything illuminating. In fact, I’d argue that by combining a number of very different applications of free under one umbrella, Anderson does not clarify free, but rather makes it more confusing. For example, a business model […]
No, Commoditization Of Software By SaaS Doesn't Lead to Death By Communism
In the light of a recent announcement, I was discussing with a developer about SaaS. His main argument against the SaaS era was that the low margins will lead to the death of software industry. Our conversation was more political but I will try to focus on the techbiz side of it than the political […]
Are Free Customers Disposable?
Image by CC Chapman via Flickr Phil Wainewright writes on ZDNet.com about how web giants are treating their customers More than any of these acts, though, the most constructive change would be to get rid of the mindset that leads these Web giants to belittle the circumstances of its ‘consumers’. Is it unreasonable of us […]
