Business Strategies (Products, Technology, Marketing & Sales)

As companies continue to figure out the true role of a Customer Success Manager(CSM), various aspects of the job keeping coming up for debate. As such the Customer Success Manager job is an overarching role that touches various functions such as sales, on-boarding, implementation, training, support, product while continuing to be the single point of […]

We have all heard and know about Buyer’s Journey. The process they go through from the time a technology need arises, all the way through the decision process, involving inputs from all the stakeholders, till they make  a purchase. While that journey has been analyzed and optimized and then some,  I don’t think SaaS companies […]

Selling Software-as-a-Service has created new challenges for companies around subscription billing, pricing and managing customer accounts. This has created a new category of software offerings called Subscription Billing. This post will outline the characteristics of a good subscription billing software.

Customer Success has become the mantra for software companies in the SaaS space to create a profitable company. I recently did a presentation to group of leaders from the technology space around how Customer Success is changing the very fabric of a software company. Customer Success is not a new term used for the erstwhile […]

This question was originally posted on Quora and I had responded. I am expanding on that answer in this post. As companies push firmly into a SaaS delivery model, providing ability to do a trial/evaluation has become table stakes. In the new world order of technology procurement, buyers are more educated and prefer to touch-and-feel […]

2010 was a blockbuster year for Cloud Computing, no two ways about it. The year started with naysayers pooh-poohing Cloud Computing as YATF (Yet Another Technology Fad) only to come back and endorse cloud with a backhanded compliment albeit calling it Private Cloud. A lot was achieved in terms of bringing down the hurdles that […]

The world is shrinking and the traditional boundaries between Desktop, Client-Server, Web and Cloud technologies are getting blurred. While some of your business applications should be strictly on-premise, some have to move to the private cloud and some travel to the public cloud. The users community of today’s applications are spread across Product divisions Geographies […]

Cloud Computing has created enough of a challenge for companies. On the one hand, they have investments made into traditional on-premise technologies which has developed firm roots in the enterprise, thanks to all the customization, resources etc. On the other hand they see these new Cloud solutions, all of which they wished their existing vendors […]

As we end the year 2010, a year that can be considered as  a blockbuster year for Cloud Computing, I thought it was time to take a look back. The rhetoric around “True” Cloud and “False” Cloud is still bustling along with gay abandon. The year began with Larry Ellison chiding – “What the hell […]

As I write this post from DreamForce, my second year attending the event, the buzz here is incredible. The last two days have seen a slew of announcements from Salesforce.com. Being a showman is definitely not something Marc Benioff would complain being tagged as. Force.com for all the accolades still carried the tag of being […]

Service Levels have always been a critical business continuity metric that companies have tracked. This has been true even through the years when companies managed their entire technology portfolio themselves. With technologies increasingly moving to cloud, SLAs and the Recovery Metrics (RTO and RPO) are more critical for both the service provider and service consumers. […]

Last week I attended CloudExpo West in Santa Clara and had an opportunity to listen to many sessions, talk to quite a few vendors and those seeking cloud solutions. Amongst other things, lack of standards repeatedly came up as one the gating issues for wider adoption of Cloud in enterprises. I have continuously maintained that – Cloud […]

Last week I attended a presentation by Adrain Cockcroft (@adrianco), Cloud architect behind Netflix’s amazing move to Amazon EC2 infrastructure.  Check out the video of the 90 minutes long presentation. It was an excellent presentation with a good mix of technical and business areas covered. (Besides that Netflix also sponsored large number of Pizzas for […]

Cloud Computing has slowly but surely seeped into every aspect of technology. All the Cloud-in-a-box, not-in-a-box, babble notwithstanding, there has been steady progress made on multiple fronts.  With the challenges around Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) all but conquered, technology vendors have firmly and steadily moved up the stack to kill the Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) monster. In attacking the multitude […]

The traditional software (on-premise) sales model relies on the both direct and indirect distribution, leveraging the indirect Channel (the Channel) to build a loyal customer base and to generate a large portion of sales. Value Added Resellers (VARs), and System Integrators (SIs) play a major role in the evangelizing, demand generation, pre/post sale activities and […]

Software-as-a-Service business with all the virtues that it purports also demands that the service provider be agile. Agile, not only, in terms of the way product is built but delivered and managed. Unlike in the traditional software days, subscription revenue model requires that SaaS solution provider measure every process and continuously adapt based on the […]

Microsoft has never been known to be the first mover in any new technology or product. If anything, they end up being the last entry into any new burgeoning technology area. Case in point, Office applications, Database, ERP, Web Search, Game Devices and now Cloud. But also true is the fact they don’t stay last […]

Storage leader EMC, the original acquirer par-excellence is at it again. Today they announced the acquisition of Greenplum to get into Cloud Computing and specifically database management. For a company that started out as a furniture reseller (I bet you did not know that !), they made successful transition into memory disk drives and eventually […]

Penetration Testing is a process wherein you simulate the actions of a real hacker. A series of activities, aimed at various parts of a IT infrastructure, are performed to gain access to the data and network devices that one should not be having access to. The activities conducted during a penetration testing could assume the […]

Intrusion Detection is the process by which you determine if there has been attempts to gain authorized access to data or application that is deemed as confidential. The source of  intrusion could be through any of the following means application, either through Unauthorized Accounts, SQL injection, URL hacking or cracking passwords network infrastructure, through open […]

As SaaS model firmly establishes itself as the go-to software delivery model, the metrics that companies need to track or manage their business to are different. Based on the sales model, user acquisition, pricing, revenue model, profit margins new metrics have become critical. If you are a SaaS business, here are few that you have […]

I was part of a small group of SaaS/Cloud leaders who got together to talk about Pricing strategies, organized by Lincoln Murphy (@lincolnmurphy). The group consisted of founders of early stage startups that were comparing notes with fellow startup leaders, on various pricing strategies that worked for them and virtues of each of them. Amongst […]

The internet is littered with top 10 lists advising of the considerations for the cloud, which primarily are designed to help you decide if you should move to the cloud or not. But once you have made the important decision to migrate your app to the cloud, the below offers a list of important things […]

Open Source software and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represent the two real disruptions in the arena of enterprise software. In the last decade both have experienced real success and challenged the inertia that persisted in the enterprise software controlled by proprietary vendors. New business models, Product offerings have provided consumers with choices on both the price-performance as […]

As SaaS increasingly becomes the preferred way for delivery and consumption  for all things software, incumbent on-premise vendors are feeling the heat to come up with their own version of SaaS application. Customers convinced of the  cost efficiencies of the SaaS model are resenting the hefty support contracts. The challenge of coming up with a […]

In my previous post in this series Graduating Cloud to the Enterprise, I covered Infrastructure-as-a-Service and highlighted some of the key gating factors for mass adoption by large enterprises. In this post I will analyze the benefits and challenges of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). To give you good sense of what Platform-as-a-Service would mean I will start […]

Companies large and small added Cloud Computing as an agenda item to every key decision they made around IT last year. As companies continued to combat the budget pressures stemming from the financial downturn the cost-efficiencies delivered by SaaS, PaaS, IaaS are becoming increasing irresistible. These topics are no longer fancy acronyms that are restricted […]

We all have had those moments where we run into this need to urgently mail documents to someone, overnight, international and on-time. Fred Smith revolutionized that industry by providing a reliable service that people bank on to have their documents delivered on-time to practically all the corners of the globe. That was 20 years ago. […]

A sales model typically used in Software-as-a-Service businesses to structure the sales organizations. In this model, the sales force is divided into two groups,  Hunters, who charter is to find and bring new customers and Farmers, whose responsibility it is to build relationships, nurture them and identify opportunities to upsell into those customers. This has […]

2009 was a banner year for SaaS. With all the banter around Cloud Computing as an advancement in technology and it glories bandied around I would still be hard pressed to find a more compelling reason behind the larger success of SaaS – than the distressed economy. Companies with dwindling IT budgets ratcheted up the […]

I know every one and their grandfather has their own definition of what Cloud Computing is. As we go through the blogs, marketing paraphernalia we keep seeing the definition of cloud computing evolve (or disintegrate). So to that end I sought to find out what some of the top technology leaders felt and thought of […]

Established companies venturing into SaaS business or newbies starting off as SaaS companies have to deal with a lot of new and evolving challenges. Everything that you can possibly think of is different with SaaS model. To say that it is changing the software business is an understatement. Starting with delivery model, architecture, sales, support […]