Connecting the dots ...
You’ve seen the Great Plains version, and I’ve told you to wait for the SAP version…. here we go:
Fun aside, SAP’s Business ByDesign is coming… (most likely) … in the second half of the year. I can’t wait to see a SAP video:-)
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
Since I’ve shared with you a video making fun of the Suites it’s only fair to show how a “suite”, NetSuite makes fun of competitors. Oh, I love edgy marketing:-)
But this is nothing.. wait till they publish the SAP vs NetSuite video we’ve just seen at the SuiteCloud conference 🙂
(And I can’t wait for a SAP response ….)
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
I guess I should start theme days. Yesterday it was passwords, today it’s a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this time it’s actually 4 images, but they tell the full story.. no comment required.
New Blog Post: Check Out the NEW NetSuite Compete Site!: check out the new NetSuite compete site for competitive… http://twurl.nl/0h2gyj
OK, I am clicking through.. only to find this:
What’s this? Obstacle course? hm… click through again…
Geez, will this ever end? Click… click..
No way, Jose. I’m so outta here. #FAIL.
Update: On second thought, I think Microsoft must have a penchant for Obstacle Courses – here’s another one.
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)
I get a lot of junk email that I normally ignore, but this one ticked me off enough to write about:
Major Changes for Bay Area Entrepreneurs Workshop
Changes? To what? I’ve never heard about this program before.
Lowering the price of the Workshop by $500 to $1,000
Ouch! Lowering? And then it’s still $1,000? Now I really have to check it out…
The Bay Area Workshop is a series of weekly, 3-hour long presentations, 8 in total for a “discount” price of $1,000, or $175 per individual session. The “Team” consists of the CEO. The Agenda focuses on Business Plan building, culminating in an investor presentation, and the presenters are “named” illustrious experts like “Start-up consultant”, “Go-to-market consultant”, “Marketing consultant”, “Angel investor”.
Most impressive, isn’t it? Wait, here’s a preview: you can watch a 46-minute embedded webinar here. No, your video did not freeze, you really are staring at one single slide (long live Powerpoint!) for close to two minutes. Never mind that you can’t read the small print and full-screen toggle does not work…. I’m sure there’s value in there … somewhere 🙂
Oh, boy. If I wanted to be cynical, I’d say this program is a tired, half-cooked attempt at delivering recycled presentations by a retired executive at a premium price. But I don’t want to be cynical, so I’m not calling it a rip-off… All I am saying is: I’m not sold, and buyer beware.
OK, here’s what I really think:
If you are in a corporate job thinking of becoming an Entrepreneur – save the money, these courses will not “make you” an entrepreneur. You should probably keep your job.
If you already are talking to potential partners, are busy building an early stage product, then you already are an Entrepreneur. You have the drive, you did not “get it” from a bunch of expensive classes. You may or may not get funded one day, and sure, there’s a lot to learn, but you can pick it up along the way. There’s probably no better place to start than reading Mark Suster’s series. Sage advice from an Entrepreneur-turned-VC. By all means, network: go to events like SF Beta, the New Tech Meetups in SF or the Valley, Meet real VC’s at events hosted by SVASE – wherever you start, one event will lead to another, and you will make real-life connections.
Most events will cost you $20-40, some a little more expensive, but whenever you see a 3-digit price-tag, run the other way! And don’t even think of spending a thousand bucks just to hear from unknown instructors how you should put a business plan together.
As for The Bay Area Workshop, I saved the best for the last. If you really have a thousand bucks to throw away, would you expect to just sign up and attend? No, you have to apply and “qualify”:
To apply for all eight session of BAE Workshop, send your business summary to apply@baeworkshop.com. We will evaluate the submissions and notify those accepted into the program.
I’m so out of here…
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
Hm… I think I know which website they may be talking about:
No kidding… yes, I know it’s April Fools Day, but this is real – an accounting SaaS provider , no less. I once speculated on a brave new business model: Ugly Service taking commissions from the sunglasses industry… but this is beyond imagination. Ziki, the company I wrote about back then came to their senses – wonder how long it will take for Brightbooks to become … hm.. less bright? 
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
You heard the good news here first, so it’s only appropriate to be the first to follow up: Bob Warfield is likely out as CEO of Helpstream, a Social CRM SaaS provider. The company website still lists Bob as CEO, but his blog post this morning implies news not yet officially announced:
Success. Success. Failure. Success. Failure.
That’s it, that’s my story. It’s been my heartbeat. I’m a Serial Entrepreneur with a 60% track record, which is comforting, except that I’m coming off my latest failure at Helpstream. 60% is way in excess of what most any VC ever gets. It’s way better than anyone I know, in fact. But nothing is ever really very comforting at a time like this.
There you have it – but let’s quickly add, my post is purely speculative, in fact I don’t even know if it’s management change, or the entire company… (will update when I hear details). Instead of further speculation, let me add a bit of personal touch – who I know Bob to be: an immensely experienced software Executive with great vision, an amazing thinker, who shares a lot – as time permits.
He is a fellow member of the Enterprise Irregulars, an invitation-based small think-tank of software execs, analysts, consultants, bloggers. The posts you see on the blog are just the tip of the iceberg: we have a lot more, often intense debates going on in a closed discussion group. Participation is very time-consuming, but rewarding. Everyone learns in the process. But while quite often we can only afford 2-3 liner quickies, every single contribution by Bob is a complete essay, full of learnings – I’ve often told him he should just convert his group emails into blog posts 🙂
As they say, every cloud has a silver lining – well, here’s the “good news” for us:
Fortunately, the recharge doesn’t take me long. I get bored easily. I start talking to people, networking, and pretty soon the Startup Energy is flowing in my veins again. In the meanwhile, I will have time to be an active blogger once again. This is a happy synchronicity, because I will have a lot to say. While it’s fresh, I want to go over my latest learnings from the Helpstream experience. It’s good therapy for me, and perhaps just a little bit helpful for you, dear reader. I wanted to pen this initial story for the series on my first work week day of unemployment.
I’m sure it will be a fascinating series, we all will learn a lot – and Bob will no doubt be back in business soon.
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
How do I know, when I’m not even there? By reading what others say. For starters, here’s Jolie O’Dell who attends this year’s conference:
Too many people, not enough tech.
…non-technical people aren’t here to learn; they’re here for self-congratulation and mutual masturbation. People I’ve never heard of are referring to themselves as Twitter celebrities and generally making me ill.
This show isn’t fun, and I won’t be coming back.
For contrast, non-attendee Danny Brown says: Why I’m Not Missing SxSW. Dennis Howlett chimes in: The not attending SXSW grump report Yes, Dennis is a self-proclaimed curmudgeon, but he has a point, and he does not seem to be alone.
I dropped by at the Cloud Connect conference yesterday (yes, dear organizers, I sneaked in with my badge from the previous event hosted by SAP’s CEOs, as your registration closed early.) From the full house (standing room only) at Geoffrey Moore’s session I tweeted:
So are all the workabees @ #ccevent while the party types went to #SXSW?
Chirag Mehta picked up on my teasing Geoffrey Moore:
Well, all iPhone folks are at #SXSW RT @ZoliErdos: Geoffrey Moore needs to update his speech- said look at your Blackberries LOL #ccevent
You probably get the drift by now… but here’s Jeremy Pepper spelling it out for you: I Don’t Do SXSWi
For the past few years, I keep hearing the same thing about SXSWi:
- It’s spring break for social media
- It’s a week long party
- It’s one night after the other of bars and alcohol
- It’s great networking
- I go every year, and make my agency pay for it no matter what because it’s a great party (this said to me by a former boss when I asked what the value is there – notice nothing about actual work, though).
I rarely hear “it’s a great event for my company/agency to reach the right people for product A, B or C”. It’s always about the drinking.
… take a step back and think of this: can you justify missing Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday to your boss or client? And, well, the rest of the week is a wash also if you’re hungover.
And, as a sage executive said to me about CES: there’s going to be a bad day of reckoning for social media. Corporations are going to ask for ROI, and going to party is not ROI.
Sour grapes? I don’t think so. But back to the question on how I know SXSW has peaked? Because declaring non-participant status is becoming trendy. This would have been unthinkable last year. So my prediction for next year: there will be even more : “why I am not going” declarations, and the year after SXSWI will be “uncool”. The trendsetters move on to another party conference 🙂
Image by Hugh MacLeod, who calls it the annual 5-day drunken orgy (which he is attending, btw….)
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
What we missed in our Google Apps Marketplace coverage: the Best Poster Award … drumroll.. goes to box.net:
And while at it, their video isn’t too shabby, either:
Wait… is that an iPad killer with a great virtual keyboard at 0:46?
Bias alert: I’ve been watching Box.net from the humble early days starting here:
..to becoming a successful business. Just sayin’ 🙂
(Update: my secret retirement plan is collecting royalty from Box.net for using Google-in-a-Box 
)
P.S. On a more serious note, here’s our previous Google Apps Marketplace coverage:
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners.
The new Marketplace fills an obvious need: Google Apps has 25 million users at over 2 million businesses who clearly need more than just the communication / collaboration / Office type applications Google can offer today. Here’s a chart of some of the initial Marketplace participants:
As you can see, the list represents a wide range of partners – some are very obvious fit, others bring questions re. future business model. Just picking a few randomly, I can easily see how electronic signature management vendor Echosign, the obviously named eFax or meeting scheduler Timebridge expands Google Apps functionality, and they are all easy to use applications. Spanning Backup is a brand new product just launched days ago, but they’ve established credibility with the previous product, Spanning Sync.
At the other end of the scale we have fairly complex offerings represented by NetSuite and Successfactors. For SMB SaaS ERP and HRM (yup, lots of acronyms) offerings integrating Web based office apps or email is a natural fit, but these companies have a very different sales and implementation model: far from the simple test-buy-click-to-install model they have a longer, more traditional sales cycle, a few weeks of implementation work, training..etc. It will be interesting to see how their presence at the Marketplace plays out, and which side generates more deals for the otherl.
Then there’s Zoho (dislosure: Zoho is sponsoring CloudAve, my main blogging gig). On one hand, clearly competing with Google, on the other hand, partnering where reasonable. My personal opinion has been for a while that Google should have acquired Zoho long ago, offering a killer combo of Gmail+ GCal and the Zoho Business Apps to the SMB space. Obviously neither Google nor Zoho thought it was their best interest (and not mine, either, why would I want to lose our Sponsor…), but they finally met at the Marketplace:-) Kudos to Google for playing fair with co-opetitors in the interest of their Customers, unlike that other company that booted Zoho from their Appexchange when they did not agree to kill Zoho CRM… CRM is now Zoho’s best selling product, and Google Apps users will now have easy access to it, as well as to Zoho Projects. Zoho Meeting will soon be integrated, too.
Talk about integration, Google published extensive API’s for integration of 3rd party programs to Apps, the Marketplace allows easy discovery of such apps and there’s also a commercial model, eventually offering billing on the software vendors’ behalf, for a 20% cut. For now the actual purchase transaction takes place outside Google, but once it’s completed, Administrators of a Google Apps domain can simply enable the new apps which will be accessible via Google’s Universal Navigation.
Other then for the obvious reasons – users / customers having more choice, I am happy about this launch because I think if any company, Google has the clout to actually expand the market, and in a way influence user behavior, moving us all, consumers and business alike from the traditional sales-heavy model to a pull-model, where we try-click-to buy. I wrote about this ‘shift’ in detail in the previous post .
Stay tuned for more analysis from Ben who will look at the details as well as competing Apps Markets, and from Krish who will look at some individual offerings.
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
I am dusting off an old post I wrote more than two years ago, and while it shows my lazyness, I am doing it in the belief that the ideas I raised back then may soon get an answer … albeit not exactly the way I imagined. And interestingly enough, just about every company I mentioned may have a role in it. Or not. After all, it’s just speculation. So here’s the old post:
Google’s next killer app will be an accounting system, speculates Read/WriteWeb. While I am doubtful, I enthusiastically agree, it could be the next killer app; in fact don’t stop there, why not add CRM, Procurement, Inventory, HR?
The though of Google moving into business process / transactional system is not entirely new: early this year Nick Carr speculated that Google should buy Intuit, soon to be followed by Phil Wainewright and others: Perhaps Google will buy Salesforce.com after all. My take was that it made sense for Google to enter this space, but it did not need to buy an overpriced heavyweight, rather acquire a small company with a good all-in-one product:
Yet unlikely as it sounds the deal would make perfect sense. Google clearly aspires to be a significant player in the enterprise space, and the SMB market is a good stepping stone, in fact more than that, a lucrative market in itself. Bits and pieces in Google’s growing arsenal: Apps for Your Domain, JotSpot, Docs and Sheets …recently there was some speculation that Google might jump into another acquisition (ThinkFree? Zoho?) to be able to offer a more tightly integrated Office. Well, why stop at “Office”, why not go for a complete business solution, offering both the business/transactional system as well as an online office, complemented by a wiki? Such an offering combined with Google’s robust infrastructure could very well be the killer package for the SMB space catapulting Google to the position of dominant small business system provider.
This is probably a good time to disclose that I am an Advisor to a Google competitor, Zoho, yet I am cheering for Google to enter this market. More than a year ago I wrote a highly speculative piece: From Office Suite to Business Suite:
How about transactional business systems? Zoho has a CRM solution – big deal, one might say, the market is saturated with CRM solutions. However, what Zoho has here goes way beyond the scope of traditional CRM: they support Sales Order Management, Procurement, Inventory Management, Invoicing – to this ex-ERP guy it appears Zoho has the makings of a CRM+ERP solution, under the disguise of the CRM label.
Think about it. All they need is the addition Accounting, and Zoho can come up with an unparalleled Small Business Suite, which includes the productivity suite (what we now consider the Office Suite) and all process-driven, transactional systems: something like NetSuite + Microsoft, targeted at SMB’s.
The difficulty for Zoho and other smaller players will be on the Marketing / Sales side. Many of us, SaaS-pundits believe the major shift SaaS brings about isn’t just in delivery/support, but in the way we can reach the “long tail of the market” cost-efficiently, via the Internet. The web-customer is informed, comes to you site, tries the products then buys – or leaves. There’s no room (or budget) for extended sales cycle, site visits, customer lunches, the typical dog-and-pony show. This pull-model seems to be working for smaller services, like Charlie Wood’s Spanning Sync:
So far the model looks to be working. We have yet to spend our first advertising dollar and yet we’re on track to have 10,000 paying subscribers by Thanksgiving.
It may also work for lightweight Enterprise Software:
It’s about customers wanting easy to use, practical, easy to install (or hosted) software that is far less expensive and that does not entail an arduous, painful purchasing process. It’s should be simple, straightforward and easy to buy.
The company, whose President I’ve just quoted, Atlassian, is the market leader in their space, listing the top Fortune 500 as their customers, yet they still have no sales force whatsoever.
However, when it comes to business process software, we’re just too damn conditioned to expect cajoling, hand-holding… the pull-model does not quite seem to work. Salesforce.com, the “granddaddy” of SaaS has a very traditional enterprise sales army, and even NetSuite, targeting the SMB market came to similar conclusions. Says CEO Zach Nelson:
NetSuite, which also offers free trials, takes, on average, 60 days to close a deal and might run three to five demonstrations of the program before customers are convinced.
European All-in-One SaaS provider 24SevenOffice, which caters for the VSB (Very Small Business) market also sees a hybrid model: automated web-sales for 1-5 employee businesses, but above that they often get involved in some pre-sales consulting, hand-holding. Of course I can quote the opposite: WinWeb’s service is bought, not sold, and so is Zoho CRM. But this model is far from universal.
What happens if Google enters this market? If anyone, they have the clout to create/expand market, change customer behavior. Critics of Google’s Enterprise plans cite their poor support level, and call on them to essentially change their DNA, or fail in the Enterprise market. Well, I say, Google, don’t try to change, take advantage of who you are, and cater for the right market. As consumers we all (?) use Google services – they are great, when they work, **** when they don’t. Service is non-existent – but we’re used to it. Google is a faceless algorithm, not people, and we know that – adjusted our expectations.
Whether it’s Search, Gmail, Docs, Spreadsheets, Wiki, Accounting, CRM, when it comes from Google, we’re conditioned to try-and-buy, without any babysitting. Small businesses don’t subscribe to Gartner, don’t hire Accenture for a feasibility study: their buying decision is very much a consumer-style process. Read a few reviews (ZDNet, not Gartner), test, decide and buy.
The way we’ll all consume software as a service some day.
(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
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