Plex Systems’ CEO Jason Blessing on the Future of ERP and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Last week Plex Systems, a leading provider of SaaS-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems announced enterprise software veteran Jason Blessing has joined their company as CEO. He is responsible for the strategic direction and growth of the company, and has a proven track record in many facets of enterprise software, from new application development to [...]
B2B Marketers Need To Get Real About Social Media and Customer Engagement
B2B marketers need to get more focused on how fast their prospects and customers are changing as a result of social media. It’s time to question long-held assumptions and look to social media as a means to connect with prospects and customers more effectively. Getting Beyond PDFs to see Prospects As People In 2013, its clear B2B prospects are already much more selective [...]
Social’s Tussle with Email
The Kill Email meme never really dies. Ever since the dawn of enterprise social computing circa 2006, the value proposition has been waffling between being a process killer to a portal killer and my favorite, an email killer. Stare Email in the face all you want. She’s looking back and laughing at you. Then I [...]
The life and times of HR application software (2012 in review)
Major Themes 2012 was an interesting one for Human Resources software. From Talent Management, Payroll, Analytics, HRMS and other niche HR solutions, there were a number of cool innovations, emerging trends and a lot of M&A with a side order of an IPO. Let’s review the big themes: You couldn’t swing a dead cat at [...]
The Emergence of Data Scientists
Every year around this time, I like to do a tour of companies, mostly startups, in Silicon Valley. It’s a chance for me to get annual pulse on new trends in “the valley”. Silicon Valley is like no other place. When I grew up there many years ago it was a much different place. [...]
OpenWorld Perspective
I went to Oracle OpenWorld as a guest of Oracle and came away with a variety of observations that I can share. Some of what I saw was under NDA and that will remain undisclosed though I have to tell you that I did not see any labs or next generation products beyond what my [...]
Analyzing Social Analytics
Social (media, technologies, applications) continues to penetrate the corporate world. To date the penetration has primarily been driven by the demand to take advantage of Facebook’s massive reach and enable companies to get closer to their customers. More recently, companies started taking similar advantage of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. The quick adoption of social by [...]
Everybody’s Talking ’bout Workday’s IPO, But I Think There’s Still More To Say
I still haven’t digested every word in Workday’s recently released S-1, nor am I likely to do so before I publish this post. But I have been reading a ton of coverage of this event, some really excellent and some much less so. A major shout-out to @SAP_Jarret (and many others) for posting some of the best [...]
The Social Stack
Is it time to start talking about a social stack? If so, let me be among the first. This week in Boston HubSpot, a social marketing company, is holding a user meeting called “Inbound,” which I will attend, and this has prompted me to write out some ideas that I’ve been stewing on for a [...]
Social Research Key Findings
At the recently completed CRM Evolution conference, sponsored by CRM Magazine in New York, Esteban Kolsky presented some of the results of our social media research. We’d been working on it for most of the year and we were writing up the findings almost until Esteban gave the presentation. It killed me not to be [...]
