CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

I’ve written
before about Pearl, the UK based “mini-ERP” that just seems to do everything.
I’ve always thought of it as the little engine that could, with a team of only
five people they have managed to build a solution that covers the majority of
bases that a real world business might need – stock, email marketing, Ecommerce,
helpdesk and the all important migration from other solutions. The reason that
I’m so bullish about Pearl is that it delivers on the promise made by The Small Business Web, but does so
with all the heavy lifting already finished – Pearl packages up solutions from
third parties (MailChimp for email marketing for example) but tightly integrated
and seamlessly presented within the main app.

While being super-positive about pearl, I’ve
worried about whether or not they had the ability to take things to the next
level before being swallows – either from above by the incumbents, or below by
some new entrant.

Well it seems I need not have worried – Pearl
has just picked up USD1.5 million in funding that will see them take their
product to new heights and achieve their stated aim of being “NetSuite for the
masses”. They’ve grown from five to 18 people in the past month and are looking
to grow the team to 100 in the next few months. Past of this is a rebrand to the
new name – BrightPearl.

I was briefed by Chris Tanner, founder of BrightPearl who was understandably
excited about the funding. As he put it the funding will allow them to “drop
more prospects into the sales funnel” – with a current conversion rate of 10% of
trial to paying customers, any increase in funnel entry is going to make a big
difference to the bottom line.

However it is when comparing deal size that we get the most insight.
BrightPearl currently has several hundred paying customers but, get this, their
average subscription is $450 a month – this, for example, is over ten times the
ARPU of another SMB accounting vendor Xero, when your average deal size is
that high it stands to reason that you can invest more on each sale and can be
more focused on individual customers. It is, as an analogy, the difference
between fast food and a la carte. Without laboring the point, it’s pretty
awesome that a company of only five people like Pearl can achieve their current
USD1.5mill annualized revenue rate with zero marketing budget – it’s worth
comparing this with the only SMB accounting entrant that publishes its results,
Xero, who in the last financial year had around USD2.5mill in revenue with a
massive marketing spend.

There’s lots on the horizon for BrightPearl – better stock control, tighter
exchange integration and a PDA version along with an imminent entry into the
Google apps marketplace. Their funding, their product and the particular niche
they play in gives me lots of confidence in their chances to execute
successfully.

 

Cross posted @ CloudAve

So this is a bit of a rant. I was at the Google IO keynote a month ago and sat transfixed at the Froyo demonstration. The mobile operating system that promised to provide an answer to mobile speed, cancer and early balding. I got my free HTC EVO, sold it and bought a Nexus One fully expecting the update to Android to be available within a few days.

I’m still waiting.

I know that the industry is all about building excitement, and I know other vendors pre-announce coming developments as well. But Froyo was there in the wild and now, more than a month later, I’m yet to see a legitimate upgrade in the wild.

Yes I know I could root the phone and do a custom upgrade – but I want to be able to get a legitimate upgrade, over the air, and still have my warranty.

What gives Google? Please don’t become just another of the vaporware merchants…

Cross posted @ CloudAve

All around nice guy, and superstar sans hair Mike Maney suggested a new title for this post – “SecondLife Heads for the Afterlife” – I kind of agree with him. Mike, this one’s for you….

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year when Linden Labs announced Second Life for Enterprise. I held no punches at the time and posted my thoughts thus:

Linden say that “Virtual worlds are the best alternative to face-to-face interaction” – in the session the audience were asked how many people had engaged in video conferences (everyone had) and how many had a good experience doing so (pretty much no one). Linden then effortlessly glided to the conclusion that virtual worlds would change all that. All because itcomes complete with both a lunar landscape environment and a spaceship one. Oh my!

It seems others have got a little hot and bothered about the opportunities these sorts of offerings give to the enterprise. In one case it’s Farmville for business – Oy Vey!

Now if Linden were selling a product that enables distributed virtual design of prototypes of real products maybe I’d buy into their schtick – but they’re not – it’s all just about selling crack – except at least with crack you get the initial high.

Well it seems that my curmudgenlyness was justified as Linden Labs announced this morning that they were “restructuring” in an effort to “generate efficiencies and support their investment in new platforms”.

As part of this “restructuring” the enterprise team is being disestablished. The unfortunately named CEO of Linden Labs, Mark Klingon Kingdon is spinning it well saying that:

We’ve emerged from a two-year investment period during which, among other things, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time improving reliability and the overall user experience. Today’s announcement about our reorganization will help us makeSecond Life® even simpler, more enjoyable, relevant and engaging for consumers starting with their first experience. It will also enable us to invest in bringing 3D to the web and will strengthen our profitability

BS… Second Life has had it’s day. Second Life Enterprise was a crazy idea and the investment they put into it was money wasted from the start. ‘buff said.

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Just the other day Krish posted about the new partnership between Apigee and Heroku the Ruby PaaS player. Hot on the heels of that announcement comes news that EngineYard are partnering with TerreMark to provide a more enterprise class Ruby PaaS.

First some background – EngineYard already has AppCloud, a mid level Ruby PaaS offering that is primarily aimed at business units within an organization who want to do a bit of mid range application development. They’re announcing today xCloud, an offering aimed more for the enterprise level needs.

The key differences between xCloud and AppCloud are:

• xCloud is designed for more complex needs with higher IO requirements
• xCloud is both PCI and SAS70 compliant – a core requirement for many enterprise level uses
• xCloud is backed by SLAs – similarly a must-have for enterprise
• xCloud allows developers to deploy on custom configured hardware

I spoke with EngineYard who were quick to articulate the benefits of using an open development platform – in a comment clearly aimed at the likes of force.com and Azure, they reminded me of the benefits of using products built on open source technology thus removing any vendor lock-in and allowing for easy migration.

Being a Rail platform, EngineYard allows developers to build in languages they’re used to, and that have a large community following, rather than more proprietary offerings such as APEX or .NET that force.com and Azure support. In fact Gartner estimates that Ruby will reach 4 million programmers by 2013. EngineYard is a strong contributor to the Rails community including:

• Providing eight full time contributors to Ruby/Jruby and Rails
• Contributing to 40+ open source projects
• Supporting 33 Ruby user groups on 4 continents

PaaS is hot, open-source is cool. Put the two together with enterprise level service and robustness and you have a good combination.

Cross posted @ CloudAve

compete with Service-Now. Our advantages are usability, design, and multi-tenancy which allows us to deliver self-provisioning and self-service

I’ll not dwell on the usability and design aspects, in my review of Service-now I mentioned that I found it quite complex to use and that this complexity somewhat hampered the usability of the product. I’ve included some screenshots from SAManage below or even better check their demo account on the site.

What I wanted to write about however was the multi-tenancy issue that Gordon raised. You see Service-now are unashamedly single-tenant – interestingly enough they even have a presentation differentiating SaaS and ASP in which they mention the perils of multi-tenancy (alleged inflexibility). Funnily enough we’re in the process of writing a whitepaper comparing and contrasting on-premise, ASP and SaaS and also focused on multi-tenancy as a core issue – our analysis is somewhat different to Service-now’s though in that we consider multi-tenancy to be close to a core requirement for SaaS.

At the recent SuiteCloud event (see disclosure) we saw the high levels of customization that NetSuite is offering end users through its multi-tenant application.

Interestingly enough, a company I’m an advisor to, Connect2Field, is right now going through the perils-of-single-tenancy issue. Connect2Field is an application for field service workers and one of the barriers to growth they’d been encountering was their (until recently) single-tenant approach. This approach has some particular detrimental impacts:

Inability to self provision

Part of the strategy that a SaaS vendor needs to adopt is enabling the self-provision of the application by end users. Quite simply there should be no impediment to a user signing up and starting with the application immediately – single-tenancy unfortunately requires that a separate database be set up for each user and results in a manual process needing to be made for provisioning. A previous single-tenancy strategy directly impacted on the ability of Connect2Field to grow its userbase without significant manual input.

Cost implications

While I’m a firm believer in articulating the added value that SaaS can bring – one of the benefits many of us articulate when talking about SaaS is the cost savings that can be made. Part of these cost savings are obtained by the vendor building their applications as efficiently as possible – both in terms of provisioning efficiencies (see above) but also in terms of ongoing efficiencies. Running a SaaS application in a multi-tenant format best places a vendor to realize, and hence pass on to their customer, these efficiencies.

Continual Improvement

Multi-tenancy enables vendors to learn from performance issues, solve them and have that solution immediately driving benefits for all of their customers. It’s also a real driver of trust – with single-tenancy only the customer affected knows when an application goes down. With multi-tenancy everyone is affected and hence this drives performance improvements, service improvements and honesty from the vendor.

Anyway – enough about multi-tenancy and back to the SAManage application. As the following screenshots suggest, and my kick around with the demo version confirm, SAManage is an intuitive product to use – it doesn’t take long to achieve at least a rudimentary understanding of how it works – something that is important for any product selling into businesses were users have any degree of autonomy over what they use – if it’s not intuitive and easy to get to grips with, there’s plenty of other offerings which are.

Of course SAManage gives users a nice graphical dashboard – full of the requisite pie chart and bar graphs:

And with a nod to enterprise 2.0 – SAManage has a bunch of collaborative type functionality – in this example a service ticket can have comment, files and related incidents affixed to it by the operator or other collaborators – it also allows for auto tagging to facilitate findability at a later date:

From what I saw SAManage is a nice product that nicely blends the usability and functionality that it’s medium and enterprise customers require.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

Take a flight within New Zealand on AirNZ and you’re not greeted by a crusty safety message – rather you’re entertained by some authentic Air New Zealand staff, airbrushed for the occasion:

But it goes further than that - just the other day Air New Zealand announced a proposed alliance between themselves and budget Australian carrier, Virgin Blue. A magazine here in New Zealand wrote an editorial criticizing the move and suggesting that service on Air New Zealand would be downgraded if the alliance went ahead. Rather than releasing a boring press release, Air New Zealand decided to have some fun with their response. The following is Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fyfe giving a quintessentially Kiwi response to the magazine’s assertions:

So, yet again, congrats Air New Zealand – you guys really understand engaging directly with customers and harnessing the power of the network.

Oh and just to balance my parochialism somewhat, a bit of credit where credit is due. Southwest do a pretty good video themselves….

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve

I’ve written before about Cloud Sherpas, a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. They’re a Google Apps reseller that also created SherpaTools for Google Apps, a free app that gives more administrator functionality to Google Apps users.

Only a few days ago, Cloud Sherpas raised $1 million in funding from Hallett Capital and other investors and, somewhat unusually, one of the investors in the round has taken over the CEO role from Michael Cohn who is becoming VP Product and Marketing.

The focus of the funding is an acceleration of Google Apps enterprise adoption and a release today will help with that. The enhanced version of SherpaTools is focused on helping enterprises protect and preserve end user data.  Google Apps admins can now delegate access to fellow IT staff, such as help desk workers, without providing the company’s master username and password credentials.  Using a dedicated pin number, a help desk worker can reset an end user’s password, for example, but he or she would not have access to a broader spectrum of employee data. While a seemingly minor improvement, this gives a degree of granularity of user control that is important to enterprise users.

An interesting new feature, and one that I’ve previously had a real need for, involves the ability to quickly and easily preserve the data of terminated employees.  Usually with Google Apps, all of an employee’s data (spreadsheets, presentations, emails, etc.) are deleted once they’re removed from the system.  In our case, when an employee left we’ve got around the issue by suspending rather than deleting a user from the system.  We then went into the account and manually removed/archived/reassigned the data files we wanted to keep.  Not at all user friendly!  With the new release of SherpaTools, IT admins can automatically delegate all of a terminated employee’s files to his or her manager or another user in the system. 

Cloud Sherpas is moving beyond it's free tool and will soon introduce a paid version. In an interesting twist however, users who buy their Google Apps licences directly from Cloud Sherpas will get all the SherpaTools premium features for free - a nice little inducement if ever I saw one!

In terms of where Cloud Sherpas are at now, they’re reporting around 2100 businesses users serving nearly 300,000 workers. I’ve said before that I think tool like this serve a dual purpose – firstly to drive customers to CloudSherpas service offerings (deployment and migration to Google apps) and secondly to get the attention of folks like Google for a potential future trade sale – let’s watch and see what happens in Cloud Sherpas’ case.

CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

Cross posted @ CloudAve