Tag Archives: Microsoft

June 27, 2011 Posted in Business 2 Comments

.NET has Enterprise Cred–AppHarbor Banks on That With a PaaS

By Ben Kepes

In the race to build credibility with the development community, Ruby on Rails wins the battle to be cool hands down – look for a new web 2.0 application, or hunt down a quintessential garage-dwelling developer and it’s a safe bet they live in Ruby. That doesn’t change the fact

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May 18, 2011 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Coupa Gets New UI, and Guarantees Results

By Ben Kepes

I’ve written before about Coupa, a provider of a SaaS product for controlling and streamlining purchase and expense management. When I first reviewed the product I had questions around the viability of a third party product offering these services – the way I saw it this was pretty much core

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March 1, 2011 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Microsoft and the Small Business Cloud War. Because Not Only Millennials Drive Change

By Ben Kepes

Last week was a little humorous. Across my desk came a Forbes.com article stating that “Microsoft will win the small business cloud war”. In the article Gene Marks tells of a visit to a small town in the US where he finds Jared Morgan from Bradshaw & Weil insurance agency

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January 18, 2011 Posted in Business 1 Comment

On Microsoft and the Lack of Startup Cred

By Ben Kepes

The recent domain profiling of Y Combinator startups was interesting reading from a “how far ahead of corporate IT are startups when it comes to cloud services?” question, but also interesting was a look at Microsoft‘s performance among the companies. Startups are cool right? And large technology companies want to

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November 1, 2010 Posted in Business 1 Comment

On Free Products, Open Standards and Why Google Apps Beats OpenOffice

By Ben Kepes

Andy posted a link to this Microsoft video. Now most people would agree that this is a strange thing for Microsoft to do – OpenOffice can hardly be  threat to the MS Office franchise and this just looks like the big boys getting heavy on the little guys. On that

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September 29, 2010 Posted in Business 9 Comments

On Suites for Accounting Practices – Xero Invests

By Ben Kepes

Xero yesterday announced a small investment in New Zealand based Max solutions, the company behind SaaS project management product WorkFlowMax. This investment, while small and regionally focused shows a growing trend for vendors. This announcement was part of a broader initiative called “The Modern Practice” tying together a variety of

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August 6, 2010 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Automating Private Clouds a Growth Area

By Ben Kepes

As acceptance of the cloud computing concept grows, many companies are using private clouds are an entrance ramp to cloud computing. Companies are seeing this trend, and the the marketplace is divided between big-vendor solutions and smaller players looking to offer broad solutions that aren’t vendor-specific. It’s a busy space

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July 20, 2010 Posted in Business Leave a comment

FreshBooks Integrates with Salesforce. Democratization in Action

By Ben Kepes

This morning FreshBooks, the SaaS invoicing application that boasts hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide, will launch it’s integration with salesforce.com/ Normally another integration from FreshBooks,  company that prides itself on integrating with almost every SaaS player in the marketplace, wouldn’t raise any eyebrows – but this is interesting given

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July 12, 2010 Posted in Business 7 Comments

Azure Launches Cloud in a Box, But this one might be more than just CloudWash

By Ben Kepes

Big news today was the announcement by Microsoft that it is releasing Azure technology to some hardware vendors. The ideas of this is to create a Windows Azure platform appliance that will form (according to Dell, one of the hardware partners) a “turnkey cloud platform available to enterprises to enable

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June 26, 2010 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Salesforce Countersues Microsoft – Bad Strategy?

By Ben Kepes

According to Bloomburg, Salesforce is countersuing Microsoft over it’s recent action. ‘While this move is entirely understandable I wonder if it isn’t a mistake for Benioff and the gang at 1 Market. Despite being a $1bill plus company, Salesforce has managed to retain an air of being the underdog (at

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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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