The World’s Most Ethical Software Companies: What They All Have in Common
Earlier this month The Ethisphere Institute announced their seventh annual list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Jacquelyn Smith wrote an excellent analysis titled The World’s Most Ethical Companies where she provides an overview of the methodology and selection process. You can review the methodology and see a full list of the winning companies here. [...]
The $64,000,000 Question: When Things Become Unstoppable
A little while back, a VC asked me what I thought of a prospective mid/late stage investment. I was/am reasonably familiar with this company as it is adjacent to EchoSign. My answer was, well, I’d probably pass — certainly at the valuation (12x+ ARR). I said the product was ooooold and the platform dated, the [...]
Enterprise startup lessons from Muhammad Ali
During conversation with Christian Gheorghe, CEO of startup analytics vendor Tidemark Systems, I raised the issue of competition with established vendors. Tidemark’s product includes a real-time display, called Storylines, which allows ordinary users to interact easily with deep business data; it’s the kind of thing destined to attract competition from the large vendors. Also read: Larry Dignan’s ZDNet article on [...]
CRM Watchlist 2013 Winners: Consulting and Systems Integrators hook up: Part 2
This is now truly the final post for the 2013 CRM Watchlist. It consumed 4 months of my life and thus if you read my stuff, 4 months of yours. But it ends on a really good note. Today we look at the smaller impact players, two who affect particular ma…
Lightening Up The Travel Gear
Last week at bpmNEXT was my first solo outing with the new blogging setup: Google Nexus 7 tablet, Logitech Bluetooth keyboard, and WordPress app for Android. I was also working on a white paper for a client, so had to edit and view documents in Word and PowerPoint formats, for which I use use the [...]
CxO Talk: Microsoft, salesforce.com, CRM, and the science of hugging
This week’s episode of CxO Talk, with my co-host Vala Afshar, features top CRM analyst, Paul Greenberg, as our guest. Paul is widely known as the “godfather of CRM” and is a contributor to ZDNet. Here are important topics from the discussion: On Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Microsoft held its annual Convergence conference in New Orleans [...]
Chatter to Become the Primary Salesforce Interface
I flew home from Microsoft Convergence in New Orleans arriving back in Boston around 9:00 PM last Thursday. I was tired from capturing a week’s worth of information from the Microsoft fire hose for the previous four days. But on Friday a Tsunami named Salesforce.com blew into town to inaugurate a world tour trumpeting the [...]
When Big Companies Can Kill You. And When They Can’t.
I remember every day, every moment, of both my start-ups with hyper-lucidity. But a few moments especially stand out. Those times when BigCo calls you up to their fancy office, and tells you they are going to enter your space and kill you. It happened to me twice at EchoSign. I’m not going to share [...]
Blueprint to Re-Cycle the much Hyped MagiK Kvadrant
Fellow Enterprise Irregular and HfS Research Founder Phil Fersht introduced their new Blueprint with an appropriate title: Step aside Magic Quadrant, hello Blueprint. I think such a milestone warrants a historical overview of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Hype Cycle, Magic Cycle, Magic Hype, Hyped Magik… or any other variation you prefer. And since it’s just a few [...]
The truth about Magic Quadrants, Waves etc
My friends at Horses for Sources are introducing their Blueprint which they position as “not reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst” as say a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave. I hope they do well with it, but there are some fundamental flaws with the MQ or Wave that I am [...]
