CEO Interview: Jason Blessing of Plex Software
I have written a number of times about Plex Software. They offer a cloud-based ERP solution that has sold quite well to manufacturers, especially those in the automotive industry. My initial interest in them was due to the size of their product offering (i.e., full ERP) and their multi-tenancy. Recently, the company has undertaken a [...]
IaaS Market—Who Wants It?
I saw this headline on Yahoo Finance, “Oracle Has Big Plans To Beat Salesforce And Amazon In A $72 Billion Market” and it got me thinking about a lot of things. First, the market in question is Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS and I didn’t think that Salesforce was actually in the IaaS market. [...]
Fooled by Forbes’ fantasy fiction?
One issue dominating the tech-media back channels of late is publisher Forbe’s use of its column “BrandVoice” to promote blatantly various technology products, such as Oracle and SAP. “What’s wrong with advertorials?” I hear you ask. Well, simply put, BrandVoice articles are not clearly portrayed as advertorials, such as when you read a car advertisement in the Wall [...]
Social business? Déjà’ vu all over again
IBM is transitioning. It’s got a $1 billion business with a software product called Lotus Notes but it is consciously trying to reposition it and other products around a social business mantra. To illustrate, one of the IBM communications executives pointed out to me that the “Lotusphere” part of the IBM Connect show logo is [...]
How Might Lincoln React to Wall Street?
In my last piece, I discussed with Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, the vagaries of the subscription services market and how Wall Street analysts have a tough time dealing with subscription metrics. But already I feel a need to go beyond the original piece to add some depth to the original. The nub of the [...]
Speeding Up the Enterprise
This is the first of a series of occasional blogs whose main purpose is to make other people very rich. I mean, heck, I’ve got enough, or at least I would have enough if my family couldn’t read the word “Sale,” in department stores. So how can YOU get rich from my idea. Build an [...]
Is Social Business Dead?
Has social for business run its course and now we should just move on, because there’s “nothing to see here”? Have businesses given it a good go and, finding no value, are they abandoning their efforts?
Wall St. Leaves Money on Table for Subscription Companies
Look, we know the old truism that if you don’t have customers and profits you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. But could we please get a little balance on the profit idea? Emerging companies typically don’t declare profits because they use excess cash to fuel growth. Anything left over is plowed back [...]
The companies I should have paid more
Building a startup is hard and managing ops is really hard. Devops are hard and expensive. Luckily these days there are some amazing companies making it way easier to build the startup of your dreams. Frankly, I don’t think they are getting paid nearly enough while some are getting paid way too much. What apps [...]
Reading My Own Clippings
Like any sane person operating in the wilds of the Internet, I keep a weather eye out for what others might be saying about me. In other words, I have a vanity search crawling the web to find what there is to find. Just the other day, someone else’s vanity search (The Blue Ocean Strategy [...]
