Monthly Archives: July 2007

26/07/2007 Posted in Business, Efficiency, Governance, IT, New business, New Zealand, SaaS, Strategy 2 Comments

SaaS/SOA Asiapac report

By Ben Kepes

Springboard research have compiled this report into the projected growth for SaaS in the Asia Pacific region. The report, not unexpectedly, determines that SOA growth will be significant and enumerates some reasons for that growth; Reduced time and cost for service delivery Closer IT-business alignment Ability to dynamically create business

25/07/2007 Posted in Business, Business and the Environment, Society, Strategy 1 Comment

An interesting, if very tongue in cheek, look at carbon trading…

By Ben Kepes

I’ve always been a little sceptical about carbon trading. I see it as an artificial solution to a problem that really needs major societal change to solve. At best it’s greenwash and at worst a way for consumers to appease their own guilt, albeit ineffective and artificial.

24/07/2007 Posted in Business, Design, Governance, IT, New business, SaaS, Strategy 2 Comments

Thats miSaaSing the point….

By Ben Kepes

One of my regularly watched blogs had this post yesterday, looking at the location of the major profit pools for SaaS businesses. The gist of the post was that entrepreneurs and investors should aim to identify the high profit areas of SaaS business and move towards operating in that particular

24/07/2007 Posted in Business, Economic Development, Manufacturing, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 1 Comment

NZ dollar punches through barrier!

By Ben Kepes

The NZ dollar has punched through the psychological USD0.80 barrier. While the change itself is small – I’d bet that there are a number of Kiwi businesses who told themselves that 80 cents was the barrier beyond which they would make some concrete decisions about their businesses. I’d be surprised

23/07/2007 Posted in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, New business, SaaS, Strategy 1 Comment

CRM hits the mainstream media…..

By Ben Kepes

The Press here in Christchurch this morning had this piece on CRM systems for SME’s. The biggest surprise was that a traditional newspaper was mentioning something as esoteric as CRM but once I got over that I was pleasantly surprised at the level of understanding of the strengths and value

23/07/2007 Posted in Business, Compliance, Efficiency, My businesses, New Zealand 4 Comments

If only the IRD had a customer service focus…

By Ben Kepes

I received a phone call this morning from the IRD. It seems one of the GST returns I did from the February/March 07 period (bear in mind I do GST returns for half a dozen different entities) had an issue with it. I vaguely recall a GST adjustment I made

22/07/2007 Posted in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency, New Zealand, Society, Strategy 1 Comment

Finding that work life balance…..

By Ben Kepes

A post over here got me thinking about workweeks, workdays and the artificial constraints that an employment situations thrusts upon us. Ricardo Semler wrote a couple of interesting books about these issues and more – discussing how to empower employees, make them take ownership of a product/project/process, give them the

20/07/2007 Posted in Business, Design, IT, New business, SaaS, Society, Strategy 5 Comments

The technical/contextual continuum….

By Ben Kepes

I had a few comments about my post the other day regarding SaaS/Web 2.0 and the intersect of those two things. The comments revolved around finding technical breakthroughs that would bring us to some point of artificial intelligence (AI) or automatic contextualisation. This was seen as a tool to finding

19/07/2007 Posted in Branding, Business, Design, IT, New business, SaaS, Society, Strategy 7 Comments

So what actually is Web 2.0? And where does SaaS fall into that? Where is the intersect?

By Ben Kepes

Well, according to Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 is when the web shows the following traits; the web as a platform data as the driving force network effects created by an architecture of participation innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a

18/07/2007 Posted in IT, New Zealand, Society 1 Comment

Slow uptake of slow broadband, surprised?

By Ben Kepes

News in today that a report out by the OECD shows that NZ languishes way down on the OECD ranking of both uptake of broadband and broadband speeds available. We ranked 22nd out of the 30 developed countries in terms of fastest consumer broadband speed offered, and 22nd in terms

The Author

Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. More on Ben

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