We’re Having a SaaStr Social on September 5th on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park — and You’re Invited!
Having crossed 4,000 Followers on Quora (and thousands more on SaaStr.com), we’ve decided it’s time for a SaaStr Social, where we can get together in-person. The date’s been set: Thursday, Sept 5. We’ll be out on the beautiful decks at 2440 Sand Hill Road, overlooking the rolling hills of the valley, drinking Don Draper-inspired Old Fashioneds […]
New Meme: Business Users Are The IT
For the past two years, I have been advocating PaaS as the future of cloud services and how developers are the face of the IT in the PaaS era. I have long argued that as PaaS takes over the IT infrastructure in the organizations, we will see a shift in who holds the key to […]
Questions To Ponder: Services World And Integrated Stacks
I have decided to start a new series called “Questions To Ponder” which I will push out on some Fridays. The idea is to take a controversial topic and ask a few relevant questions so that CloudAve readers can ponder about it on their weekend. The first in this series is about the role of […]
Premature Dell Obituary?
Last week, Pando Daily had an obituary written for Dell (previous CloudAve coverage) based entirely on their dismal performance in the consumer sector. In a week and a half, Dell will announce its second-quarter earnings results. Expect a bloodbath. In the first quarter, back in May, Dell gave the market a goose egg — analysts […]
Envisioning A Services Based Future
I have been arguing how the future of IT is going to be dominated by services around big data and have even proposed a model for the next generation of PaaS. I started thinking towards this direction after a chat I had with Mike Hoskins, CTO of Pervasive Software, when we met at the sidelines […]
On Trial Periods for SaaS Companies–Is Shorter Better?
Recently KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson made the decision to reduce the trial periods offered on his product from 60 days down to 14. In blogging about this change, Jackson explained the decision saying; We analysed our trial data and found that the vast majority of people who never converted from free trial to paid-up had […]
Contempt for Customers
Thinly disguised contempt for the customer is an easy trap to fall into, after-all, without customers our jobs would be a lot easier. There is just one problem with this line of thinking… The first time I heard the term Thinly Disguised Contempt for the Customer was from the book In Search of Excellence. The example provided […]
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 […]
Financing a Services Business: The Valley of Death
It is a late afternoon ritual for me to read the Meritage Minute, a daily briefing on key news events published by my colleague Heidi Longaberger. If you would like to receive The Minute, email Heidi. Yesterday’s briefing included an AlwaysOn piece titled “In Ten Years Will All Apps Be in the Cloud?” I’m not […]
Anti Virus in the Cloud
Symantec is releasing a suite of tools today that will help companies deal with virus outbreaks that might infect documents, spreadsheets, and other ways that malware might make it back into your company. As more workers become virtual, cloud computing offers compelling ways to share information, but as workers connect, you never know what is […]
