Posted in M&A, SaaS, cloud computing on Jun 23rd, 2009 3 Comments »
I recently came across this Forbes article in the June issue by Sramana Mitra detailing some of the expected M&A activity in the SaaS space, including Citrix Systems, SuccessFactors, and NetSuite as possible targets. With many of these venture-funded businesses seeing their funding drying up, I imagine plenty of these companies will get acquired.
On-premise vendors [...]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, SaaS, Siebel/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards/Oracle, SugarCRM, cloud computing on Jun 22nd, 2009 No Comments »
Computerworld online has a great article by Rob Scheier about the myths surrounding cloud computing.
It’s a great read – and up front dispels the main myth – that there is just one “cloud” or even a single definition of what it means to be a cloud.
I’m hearing that a lot of people are tired of [...]
Posted in CRM, social media, web 2.0 on Jun 22nd, 2009 1 Comment »
I spoke with a friend this weekend that works for a New York-based IT outsourcer and had a brief, but engaging conversation about Web 2.0. More specifically, we put some historically context around Web 2.0 and how it’s adoption and drivers for adoption are vastly different from previous technologies.
Web 2.0 is the latest wave in [...]
Posted in CRM, SaaS, SugarCRM on Jun 19th, 2009 4 Comments »
OK, this is really unscientific and based mostly on my years of experience in the CRM world, some data I’ve skimmed through, a few choice Twitter interactions, and gut intuition…but I think it’s pretty accurate in some way. Basically, I believe that not only is on-premise software alive and well (SugarCRM being a great example) [...]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, Open Source, SaaS, SugarCRM, cloud computing on Jun 18th, 2009 1 Comment »
One of the things that annoys me most about SaaS, is that the main promoters of SaaS have done a great job of brainwashing people into thinking that if you are not running a total SaaS solution, then you’re using a dinosaur of a product that is akin to running a client/server application on Windows [...]
Posted in CRM, social media, web 2.0 on Jun 18th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’d like to thank Paul Greenberg for giving the industry yet another acronym to think about as we mosey along the 2.0 highway. Seriously, Paul, thanks…
Paul’s neologism is OSN – short for Outcome-based Social Networks. Read about it here.
And while I kid Paul for adding to the alphabet soup of the software market, his points [...]
Posted in Application Design, CRM, SugarCRM on Jun 17th, 2009 5 Comments »
The Sales Machine blog has a great set of tips for anyone that gives product demos for a living, and since I’m sure there’s a lot of software sales people that read Outsiders – I felt I had to link it.
There’s some simple, yet often overlooked tips found there. Mainly – “test your demo.” In [...]
Posted in CRM, Customer Conversations, SugarCRM on Jun 17th, 2009 No Comments »
I’m happy to present my inaugural Customer Conversation, which is a monthly audio installment where I interview a SugarCRM customer and shed a little light on how businesses across a realm of industries are leveraging Sugar, and more importantly, CRM in general, to drive results.
In addition to shining a spotlight on our own customers, I [...]
Posted in CRM, Open Source, SugarCRM, cloud computing on Jun 16th, 2009 No Comments »
I’ve been thinking about how a lot of the problems with netbooks – or should I say the business adoption of them – stem from the lack of memory and speed.
But, if the web became a processor, so to speak, and SaaS or cloud apps were bundled on these netbooks (or simply have subscriptions and [...]
Posted in Application Design, Open Source, cloud computing on Jun 16th, 2009 No Comments »
Some of the work we’ve been doing around our own cloud computing offerings, and those by our competitors, has gotten me thinking. It seems there are two buckets, or types of clouds, that are emerging that the majority of offerings can be categorized in.
On the one hand you have the “functional” cloud, which by that [...]
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