And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
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),…

Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce Not Only Matures But Has Plans For Enterprise Domination
Last week I attended Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce’s (previous CloudAve coverage) annual user conference which exceeded 40K attendees this year, and the blogosphere is already filled with Dreamforce posts. I am adding one more to the mix and I want to apologize straight away for my contribution to the echo chamber. I will try my best […]
Number 9 Dreamforce
For a Beatles’ fan and a fan particularly of John Lennon, the number 9 has an important meaning. It has enough meaning Lennon wrote a few songs referencing it, including Number 9 Dream. Perhaps I like Number 9 Dream because it seems to be, quite literally, calling my name on the background vocal track. But […]

Is Dell the World’s Most Social Company? (Scorecard)
“What the heck are you doing?” Yet the language was probably a little more colorful. Three days after the launch of Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca’s blog, all hell broke loose. Several people within Dell were upset with him for linking to Engadget story about exploding laptops. But Menchaca wasn’t worried about being fired. He had […]

Salesforce Acquires Radian6 To Help Their Customers Become Socially Adept
Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that they are acquiring Radian6, a company helping organizations monitor and engage with their customers on social media, for $326 Million to boost the social intelligence of their products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. Anyone who had seen the demo of their Service Cloud 3 […]

The Blending of Marketing and IT
There are a couple of posts out today about Jive and Radian6 partnering around a solution that begins to bridge the chasm of social media and enterprise 2.0 that I’ve written about here in the past. I’m glad to see companies like Jive (who should be a defrag sponsor, but isn’t – yet – AHEM!), […]

MeltWaterBuzz – First Up to the Plate
A few days ago I posted about the seeming lack of mid-level social media monitoring tools that span the divide between standard searches and the big boys of social monitoring. To their credit, one of the first to respond to my post, and associated tweets, was MeltWaterBuzz, the monitoring service provided by MeltWater group, a […]

Social Monitoring – Exploring the Midspace
I received an email from a friend the other day who was searching for a social media monitoring service for the company he works for – they’re a few years old, have a few thousand customers and are generating enough “buzz” to warrant more than the basic Google search, Twitter search routine. The next step […]

Radian6 – Aggregating Opinion
I’ve long been a proponent of new web plays looking to find an offering that aggregate rather than create content. In this world there is no end of data available to us but what we lack is ways to aggregate that data, obtain analysis from it and, at the end of the day, derive insight […]