I couldn’t agree more with Matt Asay’s post earlier today. In it, he uses Alfresco as an example of how “customers didn’t get the memo” about using their offerings out-of-the-box. Never has that concept rung more true than in the world of IT today. As I said following our participation at the CRM Evolution conference [...]

Read Full Post »

It seems that Siemens, one of SAP’s largest customers, has said enough to bloated maintenance and licensing costs and is pushing back in an effort for to get more favorable support of their enterprise software packages. I’ve heard rumors that Siemens has been paying upwards of $50 million a year in support charges for approximately [...]

Read Full Post »

Just saw that Sage Software is finally figuring out a way to better serve its customers who have been demanding SaaS-like solutions. By leveraging elements of the open cloud – Sage is able to deliver more diverse web-based applications to end users, while also not alienating the partner network that made the company what it [...]

Read Full Post »

For the last month I’ve been following a perfect, if unfortunate, example of how important it is for a company’s executive staff to be in touch with the needs of the consumer and their industry. The long awaited turnaround of Sears by hedge fund impresario Edward Lampert may never happen, and I think it has [...]

Read Full Post »

One of the things that miffs me the most about cloud computing is that many of the multi-tenant, older generation SaaS providers have pretty much rebranded everything they do as “cloud.” I had a great talk this week with the 451 Group’s cloud computing team, and they seem to agree. So I must make it [...]

Read Full Post »

Just another shameless plug for the SugarCRM road show – CRM Acceleration – coming to Austin on September 15, Houston September 16th and and Denver on the 17th. The events are FREE, half day intensives designed to introduce and reinforce strong CRM adoption and other best practices. They are being held at some cool venues [...]

Read Full Post »

Some great points on why SugarCRM is a great choice over competing CRM systems here at the K13 blog, apparently written by someone who left Salesforce.com for Sugar Professional On Demand. The blog mainly compares Sugar to Salesforce.com – but really any of the older multi-tenant SaaS CRM solutions could be plugged in here. The [...]

Read Full Post »

One of the great things about SaaS or cloud-based software is that all you need is a web browser to be up and running. And for the most part, the web architecture of Sugar means that all end users need is a web browser to access the system. But on site software is still a [...]

Read Full Post »

As something of a follow up to my blog on software platforms, discussions in recent weeks at the CRM Evolution conference and with other industry pundits has shed some light on where the enterprise IT industry is heading in general. Just a year ago it seemed the concept of Web-based and open standard-based software being [...]

Read Full Post »

This week SugarCRM was announced a winner of the coveted Bossie award. The Sugar product was named a leader in the “Best of Open Source Enterprise Software” category. This is always a great honor, being recognized as the best in what you do. But a blog post from one of SugarCRM’s key partners Levementum caught [...]

Read Full Post »