
Guerilla Marketing @ Dreamforce
Leave the trade show booth behind and get creative. The guerilla marketing at technology shows can be entertaining, memorable and maybe even profitable. Done right, it makes a bigger impact than any brochure, newsletter or keychain giveaway. Look at what SugarCRM did at the Salesforce show!

Dreamforce post#2: Chatter, Events, REA and the Future of Management
Don’t think of Salesforce’s Chatter as bunch of social networking techologies for business people to use. If you do, you’ve missed the real potential for businesses to operate in real-time.

A Tale of Two Software Worlds: Old ERP vs. SaaS
Dreamforce’s attendance really puts a strong data point on how attractive SaaS is becoming. Other vendors this week have provided additional data points that point to a troubling time ahead for laggard ERP vendors.

Cloud-to-Cloud Integration – Another Big ERP Challenge!
NetSuite’s new Open Connect integration should make ERP buyers and vendors re-think interfaces and integration across application suites. Everyone needs to re-think what cloud-to-cloud integration, in multi-tenant apps, really means.

Demand this from software vendors
I was getting a briefing last week from a software executive. We got to a point in the conversation where the discussion was focusing on existing products. I moved the conversation to a different space, though. If you’re getting a pitch from a vendor, you should move the conversation, too! Still Market Relevant – When […]

Two Views of the Software Market
A Bridge Too Far? In a blogger briefing this week at SAP’s TechEd, SAP CTO, Vishal Sikka, drew a chart of the application software market and what new areas of technology are of interest to the firm. I’ve tried to reproduce his freehand drawing into the following PowerPoint rendering. I believe I have captured the […]
Customer Intimacy wins in SAP SI’s and Channel Partners
Yesterday, several bloggers at the SAP TechEd conference in Phoenix had an opportunity to speak with Zia Yusuf, EVP, Global Ecosystem & Partner Group of SAP.
I asked Zia what characteristics typify the best SAP partners. He rattled off five qualities that the best systems integrators and channel partners possess. These qualities and my comments on […]
Shouldn’t services firms have their own ERP?
I caught up this week with Morris Panner, CEO of OpenAir (now part of NetSuite). One aspect of our wide-ranging conversation concerned the continuing evolution of businesses, the economy, etc. towards a greater services orientation. Drawing on that, we discussed how services firms need their own version of ERP.
Here are just some of the […]
Interesting things I’ve been briefed on lately…
NetSuite, CA, iTrade Network, Meridian Project Systems, UC4, Project Open,….
NetSuite has some new financial consolidation/planning functionality in their SaaS solution. It permits global firms to handle currency conversion. Adaptive Planning’s software is at the core of this solution. This technology does not currently use an in-core memory resident database. The more of this sort of […]