Reflections on Dreamforce 2011: Now the Cloud Can Ride the Waves

September 6th, 2011

This year, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event–with a record-setting 45,000 attendees–got me thinking about the early days before the cloud was the cloud, how far its come, and how perfectly poised it is to ride the waves now driving technology adoption–mobile and … Continue reading

The Impact of HP’s New Direction—An SMB Market Perspective

August 25th, 2011

–by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group After HP’s announcement that it would ditch it’s new Touchpad and put WebOS in mothballs, rumors leaked about it’s intentions to spin-off or sell it’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) PC business and … Continue reading

Sage Summit 2011: Tackling the Sage NA Branding Challenge

July 26th, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Sage Summit 2011, Sage’s first combination partner and customer event. I’ve been attending Sage partner, customer and analyst events for several years, observing and commenting on its ongoing attempts to unify it’s corporate … Continue reading

Pervasive Puts Its Galaxy Integration Community Into Orbit

May 23rd, 2011

–by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group At its annual Metamorphosis conference earlier this month, Pervasive announced Pervasive Galaxy, which merges an online integration marketplace and community into a single, streamlined platform. Pervasive has designed Galaxy to remove boundaries … Continue reading

The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event

May 11th, 2011

Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo. However, … Continue reading

Dell and Boomi: Doubling Down on Integration

May 3rd, 2011

Originally published 4-26-11 as an SMB Group research brief in .pdf format, available here. When big companies gobble up smaller ones, you always wonder whether the acquired company will get swallowed up into the belly of the beast, derailed or … Continue reading

Intuit and Salesforce Partner Up: Who’s the Big Winner?

April 4th, 2011

Last week, Intuit and Salesforce.com announced that they would partner to integrate Intuit QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online small business accounting software with Salesforce’s small business CRM editions (Contact Manager, Group and Professional). Under the terms of the deal, Intuit will … Continue reading

Social Business: Why Having a Plan Matters

March 21st, 2011

Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true. Lester R. Bittel, The Nine Master Keys of Management This … Continue reading

Salesforce’s Dimdim Acquisition–Adding to a String of Collaboration Pearls

March 16th, 2011

The SMB Group has followed (and used!) Dimdim, which has provided innovative, easy to use Web conferencing services in a freemium model with very liberal terms of use, for a couple of years. In January, Salesforce.com acquired Dimdim for $31 … Continue reading

HubSpot: From Breakthrough to Breakout

March 9th, 2011

I’ve been very impressed by HubSpot, which helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) optimize and streamline their inbound marketing programs (see my 2009 interview with HubSpot Marketing VP Mike Volpe) for a while now. Looks like others are impressed too—as … Continue reading