Phil Wainewright
For more than a decade, Phil Wainewright has been a trusted thought leader in cloud computing, as an analyst, blogger and consultant. He maintains a popular blog on software-as-a-service on ZDNet and serves as vice-president of EuroCloud, a pan-European business network promoting cloud services and applications. He is also CEO of strategic consulting group Procullux Ventures, where he advises top cloud vendors on messaging, positioning and go-to-market strategy. His forthcoming book, Frictionless Enterprise, describes how forward-looking enterprises are harnessing the cloud for business transformation, redefining best practice for successful organisations in the 21st century.
Sourcing reinvented: cloud supply chain and spend management
If the future is a networked world, then we may well find that the future belongs to sourcing vendors. No other category of vendors has had its landscape transformed so fundamentally by the advent of the Web, to the extent that leading vendors such as Concur and Ariba took early decisions to wholly rearchitect their [...]
Big data ascends the learning curve
With several big data-themed events coming up this month — among them the global multi-city Big Data Week series — the level of social media chatter around this topic is likely to surge. One vendor that’s well placed to track that buzz is DataSift, whose stock-in-trade is analyzing Twitter data to identify trends. In preparation [...]
Cloud providers working with big data
What does big data mean for cloud providers? This is the topic under discussion at a EuroCloud UK meeting next week. This blog post is both a reflection on the topic as well as a taster for the event itself, which has an interesting and knowledgeable line-up of speakers — more details on that below [...]
People first: Cloud HRM and talent management
In 1951, the world’s first business computer was switched on at the London headquarters of J Lyons & Co, a food and catering giant that, with its chain of popular tea shops, had been the Starbucks of wartime Britain. Named LEO (for Lyons Electronic Office), its main role was processing payroll and inventory. Around the [...]
Becoming the verb for enterprise collaboration
“Box is becoming a verb in Schneider,” said Hervé Coureil, chief information officer at Schneider Electric, speaking in London today about the company’s pilot implementation of the Box collaboration platform. People have started saying, “Oh I’ll Box it for you” when they plan to share a file with colleague. The 140,000-employee energy management company is [...]
All together now: cloud collaboration, social and docs
In the emerging enterprise application landscape, collaboration is the business activity most transformed by cloud. The revolution in outcomes is far greater than those wrought by earlier technology-driven advances in global teamwork, such as the telephone, air travel and satellite communications. The Web is the first medium that provides a unified platform for every form [...]
Son of CRM: cloud sales, marketing and service in 2013
The name’s the same, but this is not the CRM your forefathers knew. Back in the client-server era, enterprise computing focused almost exclusively on automating internal systems. Today, all the innovation is happening at the edge of the enterprise, automating external interactions with prospects, customers, partners and more in the quest for what I’ve called [...]
ERP, RIP? Cloud financials and revenue management in 2013
What’s the future for ERP in the cloud, if it has one at all? I heard a disarming admission last summer from the CEO of a company that aggressively markets itself as “the #1 cloud ERP software suite.” NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told a gathering of industry analysts at the company’s SuiteWorld 2012 conference that [...]
Maybe the world isn’t ready for cloud
I heard some utterly compelling arguments for adopting cloud computing at the recent Business Cloud Summit in London. The strides being made by the UK public sector through their use of cloud computing and applications make a seemingly irrefutable case for going cloud. Liam Maxwell, Deputy CIO of the UK Government, cited a torrent of [...]
Can Yahoo ever be a leader?
Although the company is assured a place in Web history, Yahoo over the years has always seemed to have the role of reflecting conventional wisdom about the Web rather than changing people’s perceptions of what’s possible. No wonder Om Malik believes its glory days are over. Yahoo’s first iteration, back in 1994, was as a [...]
