Building the Cult of You
You may have noticed LinkedIn recently made its largest acquisition so far, of Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. If you haven’t heard of Lynda.com, it’s a SaaS / subscription service for training and e-learning. One thing to note is who its co-founder is: Lynda Weinman. The Wall Street Journal called her “the mother of the Internet.” […]
Dreamforce ’14 Developer Keynote: The Big Reasons to Reserve Your Seat Now
On the fence about whether the DF ’14 developer keynote is for you? The developer keynote is for anyone who wants to create new apps, or extend and customize their existing salesforce implementation. Reserve your seat now before they sell out!
The Simple Reason Why There Will be 10-20 Great CRM IPOs in the Next Few Years
I wrote a while back about Room at The Bottom, and how once a space gets big enough (~$100m) or so … the biggest guys end up abandoning many of the smallest customers and segments in their space. Which once a space is at, say $100m in market size, can open up a $10m hole […]
Dreamforce1 – The Context of Salesforce1
You cannot deal with modern problems using antiquated systems. – Ramon Baez, Senior VP & CIO, HP @RamonfBaez, cited here by @valaafshar I have been to every Dreamforce, and I plan on going to every future one, so long as I remain of sound body and mind. It’s not just…
Space Invasion @ Dreamforce
Last year I made a bit of fun of Oracle, picking on the symbolism in their closed, walled conference setup vs. the open festival-like environment at Salesforce.com’s competing event. Here’s a little pictorial reminder: Dreamforce did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick. Fun. Contrast that to Oracle’s […]
Friday Vendor Roundup: Socialtext, Lithium Technologies, Salesforce
Every Friday I’m going to attempt to summarize any relevant news in the future of work/collaboration space. I’ll provide the name of the vendor, a short summary of what the announcement or piece of news is with a link to the original, and finally a short POV. I can’t cover every single thing that comes […]
One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra. I believe it’s flawed. While I have some sympathy with […]
Acquisition News – Cloud Sherpas Broadens the Franchise and Moves Into ITSM
I’ve been covering Cloud Sherpas since its inception – I’m particularly interested in this new breed of services brokerage that is proving successful despite deriving its revenue from a small sliver of a very small annual charge – this in comparison to the traditional on-premise world where companies enjoyed massive consulting fees for implementation project […]
What Will Identity Look Like in the Future?
At the defrag conference recently, I took part in a few sessions that looks at the broader role of identity in a world were more and more people use cloud-based tools. One of the sessions was led by Pat Patterson, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce. In his session, Patterson drew a picture of the history […]
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 […]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
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
Pre BoxWorks Thoughts: Box To Play Best Of Breed Game?
I am on the plane to attend BoxWorks 2012, the annual user conference of Box. Before hearing anything from Box, I am trying to make sense of Box’s strategy based on what I heard in the past 3 weeks during Salesforce and Tibco events. It will be interesting to hear from Box in the next […]
If Developers are the new Kingmakers–Salesforce is Starting to Own the Castle
I’ve been attending Salesforce’s user conference now for a few years and one thing that’s always been a little awkward is the fact that Salesforce has always tried to make the event meaningful for developers but has generally created a kind of Frankenstein beast where suited business types get highbrow in the main conference whilst […]
MindTouch Delivers Knowledge Base for Salesforce Customers
MindTouch is one of the early leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 space –their CEO, Aaron Fulkerson was a regular attendee on the conference circuit. Over the last couple of years however, MindTouch has gone pretty silent as market conditions and heightened competition caused them to disappear from view. I bumped into Fulkerson in San Diego […]
