Two Questions and Some Answers
There are two questions that emerging companies in the CRM space field when they face the analysts — when are you going public and why don’t you build out a full CRM capability? The first question is easily and deftly handled by most executives and it must be. An IPO has its own cadence and [...]
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 [...]
Moving to the Front Office
Moving to the Front Office For a long time many people have been predicting the demise of ERP and while I share those sentiments, demise takes many forms. The one we all understand well is the crash and burn variety but that’s not the only and perhaps not even the predominant approach. The crash is [...]
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 [...]
Zuora User Meeting
Believe it or not some things that happened in San Francisco last week had little to do with Dreamforce. Amazing that I’m just getting to that now. Some vendors in the Salesforce ecosystem used the proximity of mutual customers to hold their own user meetings and if they weren’t exactly meetings within meetings, they were [...]
WizKids Again
I made a decision this week that pleased me and will drive some of my thinking about the CRM business well into next year. I opened up a contest called the WizKids Award. That might not seem like much and it might seem self-serving for me to write about it but maybe there’s more. WizKids [...]
Like a Virgin
It’s a slow week with lots of people on vacation. I am on a plane heading to San Francisco to shoot a video with Zuora but judging by the number of screaming children under five on the plane I would say that I am in the minority on this one. No matter, they’re cute and [...]
The Subscription Model’s Role in the Economy
Recent economic news is lousy. The Eurozone can’t seem to decide on the fundamental question the robber asked, “Your money or your life?” and indecision is cascading across the globe in the form of slow or no growth. It’s as if we’re choosing slow death, boiling our own frog. Unemployment rates are either high or [...]
Marketo buys Crowd Factory? You read it here first …
As predicted here last November, Marketo today announced it has acquired social campaign management platform Crowd Factory. After interviewing Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez about the company’s funding round last year, I headlined my post Marketo looks to buy into social, and here are the opening and closing sentences: “Marketing automation vendor Marketo has earmarked some [...]
Kudos for Zuora
On demand billing and payments company, Zuora, has been named the OnDemand 100 Company of the Year by AlwaysOn, a Silicon Valley web property that tracks activities in emerging companies. As you know if you’ve been here before, Zuora was one of the earliest movers in the market for on demand billing services for companies [...]
