The Cloud Must Go On. Watch the Banned Benioff Keynote Live.
The best thing that may have happened to Salesforce.com at Oracle Open World is getting CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote cancelled. Oracle and Larry Ellison are now officially the Bad Guys (opinions are split on whether Larry is the Emperor, Darth Vader or God), @Benioff is the oppressed Folk Hero, Salesforce.com got thei $1M keynote […]
Will “Mad Men” Drive the Social Enterprise?
Note this is a special guest post from industry authority Bruce Richardson. His blog can be found at http://stellwagenresearch.blogspot.com/. Bruce has a 30-year career in high-tech, harkening back to the days in which he worked alongside George Colony (founder and CEO of Forrester), Frank Gens (Chief Research Officer of IDC),…
Why You Should Make Your Competitors Your Frenemies
Yesterday I wrote about how to talk to investors about your competitors. In short, acknowledge they exist, be transparent about strengths & weaknesses and use your differences to talk about how you want to position yourself in the market. Conventional wisdom in most companies is that “the competition is the enemy” – it’s the rallying […]
Dreamforce Musings: Why the Real Cloud Has Gained Momentum
I had the rare and great opportunity to attend the opening two days of Dreamforce last week. Rare, because I can’t remember the last user conference I went to as an attendee rather than a speaker (turns out it’s a lot less stressful to be in the audience ☺). And great, because it truly was […]
The Master of Guerilla Marketing Turns Microsoft’s Prank Around
CloudAve readers know I am a fan of edgy marketing. Now it’s time to update my recently compiled inventory of software marketing pranks. A major show like Salesforce.com’s DreamForce would not even be real without some guerilla marketing activity – except the players seemed to have traded places this year. Guerilla Marketing is normally David’s […]
Dreamforce: Decade of Inspiration
I was at the first Dreamforce. It was in a hotel at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco and it attracted 500 people and perhaps another 200 employees — roughly 2/3 of the entire company. The big announcements were related to sales force automation, but the company also announced custom tabs and some nifty […]
Salesforce Chatter goes into GA. No Hiding Now Marc!
I’ve always been partly in awe and partly dubious about the way Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff gives… “aspirational” product announcements. On one level, it’s great to get people thinking and envisioning a future, while on another vaporware is just that – unobtainable and frustrating. Just look at his quote about Chatter: Salesforce Chatter is the […]
Messaging for Growth in a SaaS Business
I posted recently about the visit I’d made to Xactly in San Jose. As well as spending time talking about the back office processes they’d used to enable them to grow by triple digits for several years running, I spoke with CEO Chris Cabrera about the challenges that his company has faced in marketing it’s […]
The Benioff Coup. I Almost Got it Right
Watching Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff interview Mike Arrington @ Davos in January, I predicted the Big Marc was after a new job in media. It all felt confirmed when Benioff launched a series of posts at TechCrunch (although I suspected a fellow XXXXX blogger wrote his posts). But now it looks the other way around: […]
Keep your Executive Assistant happy if moving to the Cloud
Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) […]
