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 […]
Salesforce Ecosystems Grows
You can gauge the success and financial health of almost any company by looking at revenues. At least this is true in the short term. Since revenue is a lagging indicator — with the exception of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) that subscription companies measure — it only tells you where you’ve been not where you […]
(There’s No) Accounting for the Subscription Economy
You may remember the subscription economy from previous posts. It’s one way to make sense of cloud computing and the many new and very different ways of doing business on the Internet. We’re most familiar with software as a service and how different it is from conventional licenses; so familiar in fact that I don’t […]
The King is Dead, Long Live the King: The end of ERP and the birth of the Hybrid Enterprise
The future of the enterprise seems to be very much up for grabs: just as Salesforce.com proposed the end of software, and then became very much a software company, Zuora’s CEO Tien Tzuo recently authored a much referenced article on end of ERP, despite the fact that Zuora is very much a player in enabling a new […]
Venture Outlook Bullish on Cloud, Enterprise Startups
I was hoping to save this idea for either a year-end story or something focusing on the new year but events seem to have a mind of their own. The story, whenever it would be issued, would go something like this: Enterprises are picking up more cloud computing solutions and as they do there is […]
