Wow – what a shift in SaaS/Cloud adoption

When starting Celarix in 1998, the term ”SaaS” hadn’t been coined yet and we called ourselves an “ASP” or application service provider. But like the old saying goes, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. Celarix was a SaaS provider through and through and one of the very first enterprise SaaS providers in the the Logistics / SCM...

The Best Marketed Software Ever!

I have recently been advising a client on how to improve their marketing and sales effectiveness. The company is a very innovative manufacturer of industrial equipment and despite the economy, they are in rapid expansion mode. One of their key goals is to implement an integrated marketing and sales platform to more quantitatively manage direct sales, channel sales and marketing activities. The company has decided to...

Design Thinking: 1+1+1=5

Tim Brown of IDEO recently delivered a tremendous presentation at TED on  ”Design Thinking” or System Design and System Thinking.  His ideas focused on design “interactions” versus just individual design “points”. Basically the system is more than the sum of the individual components. The concept really resonates with Rule #5 for successful Social Media: Be Excellent . Let me...

Google Wave – The Opportunities Are Tremendous

I just previewed Google Wave and the opportunities for extension & integration are tremendous. I am excited to see the apps from B2C developers (Lonely Planet already has a cool tool) while B2B SW companies have an awesome new platform / capability to integrate and extend their functionality (and value props) with. Starting out, SAP and Salesforce.com have developed two elegant apps for BPM and Customer...

Cloud Computing is THE SaaS killer…with a little help from some friends.

Did the title make you go “HUH”? Let me explain. First a couple of definitions: SaaS or Software as a Services [from Wikipedia] – “is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand.” Key characteristics:  network-based access to, and management of, commercially available software activities managed from...