AisleBuyer: At the Intersection of Consumer and Enterprise Technology
Tweet Where Many Goliaths Have Failed, A David Comes Forward Thinking about it now, the David and Goliath metaphor may not work perfectly, but it does quickly focus this post. The enterprise world has spent untold billions of treasure on customer relationship management over the past two decades, and you have to ask to what [...]
Google Adwords and SEO: Beware of the Fraudsters
Most of you probably already know this, but I thought it worth mentioning here that SEO fraud appears to be increasing rapidly, along with Google Adwords fraud. Businesses across the spectrum are anxious, to say the least, to increase business. This might be one reason that the amount of daily calls, emails and other detritus [...]
Social Commerce and Our Investment in 8thbridge
Today we are announcing our investment in 8thbridge (www.8thbridge.com), a company that provides social commerce solutions to mid- and upper-enterprise customers. Following our successful investment in Extole (www.extole.com), a company that provides social marketing solutions to the same market segment, we had been looking for an investment in social commerce to round out or portfolio. [...]
Meeting with our Internet Advisory Board
A few days before the holidays our partnership met with our Internet Advisory Board, a group of 10 senior internet executives. This Board advises us on our internet investment strategy, helps us vet related investment opportunities, and assists our internet portfolio companies on business development, strategy and technology areas. The group meets once or twice [...]
We Need a New Generation of eCommerce Analytics
In 1996, while I was running IBM’s BI solutions organization, one of my groups developed the Surfaid web analytics solution. Surfaid, one of the first such solutions, was later acquired by Coremetrics (that was in turn recently acquired by IBM and made part of its marketing automation solution). Later on Omniture dominated the high-end web [...]
Research Report: Next Gen B2B and B2C E-Commerce Priorities Reflect Macro Level Trends
Recessionary Forces Challenge Organizations To Not Only Right Channel, But Also Personalize Organizations with e-commerce initiatives face a flurry of competitive forces that challenge existing assumptions put in place a decade ago. On the operational efficiency front, organizations must battle reduced product margins, shorter product life cycles, greater pricing transparency, and increased friction in multi-channel [...]
The Future of "The Cloud" – A Podcast from Ariba Live (Part 1)
As many Spend Matters readers know, I tend to think of the cloud as more of technology and infrastructure delivery (e.g., the Amazon cloud) than a fundamentally new way of software, content or service delivery. Yet some people share a different perspective and definition. ZDNet recently featured the recording of a podcast from Ariba LIVE, [...]
Zuora and the Subscription Economy
Every now and then a vendor does something that genuinely surprises and even delights me. They come up with a new feature at the least but at the most, they define a concept, which while it certainly pushes the vendor’s agenda, it also adds a new way of thinking to the overall discussion and even [...]
Thomas Accelerates the Growth of Ketera’s Network Business
It seems that being a marketplace is back in vogue these days. But this time around — based on the strategies of MFG.com, Ariba and Ketera — there appears to be two keys to being successful: building scale and building liquidity (versus following a Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come” type [...]
With Smaller Providers, Software and Services Can be Hard to Mix (Part 1)
Back in the reverse auction heyday between 1999 and 2001, I spent countless hours helping FreeMarkets evangelize its position that companies should avoid buying either software or consulting to do sourcing, but rather a combination of both — a solution. Our primary argument was that the sourcing process was inherently too complicated and difficult to [...]
