
Salesforce: The unifying message is ‘customer first’
In November 2008, I attended Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference for the first time along with 9,000 of the company’s customers and partners. The sense of camaraderie among attendees, many of whom were early adopters of the cloud and software-as-a-service religion, was eye-opening. Along with CEO Marc Benioff’s evangelical fervor for the cloud, the catchy “No […]

Come to the SaaStr Annual and Make a Week of It
It’s not often you get an opportunity to join 5,000 of your peers in SaaS in one location for a week. Sure we gather at Dreamforce, wave as we run across Moscone to our next customer meeting or maybe catch up for 5 minutes at one of the 17 parties that night, but rarely do […]

Ok, We’ve Shut Registration Down at 1,850 Folks for The SaaStr Annual. What You Need to Know.
Phew. Ok well we went a bit over capacity, but we’ll have 1,850 SaaS founders, CEOs, execs and entrepreneurs at the (first?) SaaStr Annual this Thursday in San Francisco at The Regency Ballroom. A few things to know, if your coming, and if you’re not: > If you’re coming to the day sessions, come early […]

Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Image © Mission Bay Conference Center Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one […]

MadeiraCloud Raises $1.5M From Sequoia Capital To Help Cloud Users Better Deploy Their Cloud Diagrams
MadeiraCloud, a new cloud management player, today announced it has raised Series A funding from Sequoia Capital. MadeiraCloud’s unique cloud management service enables drag and drop tools to allow users quickly and easily design, provision, manage and monitor cloud infrastructure resources. The company also announced full support for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud […]

A Pictorial Tale of Two Conferences (and more)
Recently I’ve attended two conferences two weeks apart in San Francisco, and the difference in style is shocking. One did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick:-) The other a decidedly more “closed” traditional corporate conference, so much so, that fellow commentators actually compared it […]

Dataloader.io Provides Easy Salesforce Migration
One of the great untold barriers to actually moving to the cloud is the not insignificant pain that organizations feel when migrating their data from an existing system of record to a cloud solution. This is especially the case when the solution is both an integral part of the organization’s

Zendesk Scores New Funding Round and Updated Interface
I’ve been writing about helpdesk provider Zendesk now for going on five years. Their original employee, and now APAC head, Michael Hansen, likes to tell the story about their first blog coverage (a piece I wrote for ReadWriteWeb) corresponding with the beginning of their hockey-stick growth. I don’t know about that, but I do know […]

CloudBeat is back – and the call for papers is open
Right at the end of November, we’ll once again be doing what we can to assemble a stellar cast of cloud companies and their customers at the Sofitel in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco.

Why Technology is Driving More Urban Renewal
Like many I read the headlines about Pinterest moving from Palo Alto to San Francisco and thought about the trend it portends.For those not familiar with the local geography, Palo Alto is the north end of what most consider “Silicon Valley” although nobody local calls it that. Palo Also is about 35 miles south of […]

Social – An Enterprise Overlay, or an Enterprise Fabric?
On a recent trip to San Francisco I spent talking with both salesforce and NetSuite people about their approach and general view of “social” as it relates to enterprise software. I call out these two vendors because while both are cloud-centric enterprise software companies, they have very different views on social. In fact, salesforce and […]

Chatter Messenger – Real-Time Synchronicity
Messenger sees salesforce roll out technology they gained from the acquisition of DimDim – real time aims to build upon the usage of Chatter by offering a whole raft of real time functionality that will remove the need for organizations to continue using a number of tools they currently do. Real time enables presence […]

New Facebook IPAD application rocks but
With everything there is always the potential for using something for good, or just downright stalking people. I downloaded the IPAD application last night for Facebook, and overall I really like it. But thought that the mapping feature was simply … Continue reading →

On Larry, and Marc, and All Publicity being Good Publicity
So I’ve been mentioning it on Twitter all afternoon, after being one of the first to pick up on the announcement from Marc Benioff that Oracle had reneged on its offer for a keynote position at Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco this week. Ever the showman, Benioff turned it

Is the Stack Dead?
For years now those of us who talk Cloud on a daily basis have used variations on a triangle shape as a way to articulate what Cloud actually is and how the various services that make up Cloud can be differentiated. Traditional thinking (if one can have traditional thinking in a space as young as […]