It Doesn’t Really Matter When Your Competitor is Acquired. (Except It Means You Weren’t.)
There’s a common bit of advice we entrepreneurs and execs always get: worry less about the competition, and more just about growing your own business. It’s good, sound advice. But man — it’s hard advice to follow. Between your competitors’ 100 tweets about a day about however Everyone In the World Loves Them, their $50m […]
Eating My Own SaaStr Dogfood: Why I Invested in a Start-up With a Seeming 50+ Competitors
I was asked on Quora why I recently invested in Pipedrive. I thought I would share the answer here, because it ties together so many themes on SaaStr, from Lead Velocity Rate, to Room at the Bottom, to Getting from Initial Traction to Initial Scale. I’m making a bet here that everything I know, and […]
OneLogin Launches Cross-Application Search
The announcement by Salesforce a few weeks ago that it was moving into the enterprise Single Sign on (SSO) space was both an excellent validation that sso across cloud and on-premise applications is needed, but also a rude awakening to the existing independent SSO vendors like OneLogin and Okta. While
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 […]
Cloud’s Secret Sauce–Zendesk Delivers Best Practice Analytics and Customer Satisfaction Data
I’ve long said that one of the key benefits of cloud applications is the ability of vendors to aggregate and anonymize data from their users, and to offer this anonymized aggregated data back to users who can then derive insights from comparisons between themselves and other vendors. It’s an area fraught with concerns about commercial […]
Zendesk + edocr Makes Support Easier and More Repeatable
Part of running an effective customer support operation is giving people access to documentation that helps them provide the quickest possible resolution to customer issues. In a rapidly changing world this is actually much more difficult as it sounds as approaches, procedures and specifications change rapidly. A new integration between cloud content sharing service edocr […]
Oracle Buys RightNow
Last month it was Salesforce buying customer support solution Assistly. This month it’s Oracle buying RightNow, a more mature, but similarly positioned player. The deal, worth around the $1.5B mark, fills the void that Oracle had in terms of customer-facing engagement tools. While Oracle does have CRM on-demand, this acquisition
Salesforce Acquires Assistly… Anyone Else See a Disconnect?
News that salesforce has acquired service desk vendor Assistly in a move that many of us had an inkling about well before DreamForce – it seems that dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s of he deal saw it closing after the event. Assistly is a young company that is squarely positioned to compete with […]
MindTouch and Zendesk Partner To Take Customer Service To The Next Level
Image via Wikipedia MindTouch (previous CloudAve coverage), the provider of Help 2.0 solutions, and Zendesk (previous CloudAve coverage), SaaS helpdesk provider, joined hands together to announce a product which will bring MindTouch’s social knowledge base solution to Zendesk customers for free. This will help businesses offer an even more satisfying customer service experience for their […]
Zoho Support: A Step Towards A More Integrated Suite
Zoho (CloudAve sponsor since beginning. See past CloudAve coverage of Zoho related news here) last week announced that they are releasing Zoho Support, a customer care solution integrated with their existing business suite. This is one of the applications long sought out by Zoho customers (Accounting app is another one I could think off) and […]
Crowdsourcing for the Stars
I posted late last year about how Zendesk (more on them here) had crowdsourced the translation of their application into different languages. At the time CEO Mikkel Svane commented that; Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already […]
IT Management Made Simple With Zendesk And GroundWork Open Source
Image via CrunchBase Zendesk (see Ben’s previous coverage of Zendesk at Cloud Ave), an elegant and simple on-demand helpdesk tool, is now bundled with GroundWork Open Source (GWOS), a network monitoring appliance built on top of Nagios, to offer an enterprise ready IT Management tool. Enterprises are still reluctant to embrace SaaS wholeheartedly. However, we […]
Admit Your Frailty and People Will Respect You
So Zendesk (more on them here) had a bad day. Their Worst Day Ever. CEO Mikkel Svane’s face paints a picture: To quote from his post: …a planned hardware maintenance with our service provider exceeded the one hour service window with a whopping three hours. Monday morning we experienced unusual high email traffic, which tipped […]
T-Shirt Friday #30 – Zendesk #3
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]
T-Shirt Friday #25 – Atlassian #2
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]
