Smarter Commerce for the Midmarket: An Interview with IBM’s Ron Kline

Here’s an edited transcript of the podcast series that Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and Sanjeev Aggarwal, of SMB Group recorded with Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s midmarket division, about IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs.
If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast series, select below.
Brent Leary: We’re really excited [...]

Are You Ready? Transforming Your Business for the Smarter Customer

—by Laurie McCabe, SMB Group
In conjunction with IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the second post in the series. [...]

What’s the Difference Between Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Systems?

–Guest post by Kyle Lagunas, (@KyleLagunas) with good info for SMBs about applicant tracking and recruiting software
Most people know that, although they both work in talent acquisition, third party recruiters and internal recruiters serve very difference functions. As such, it makes sense to assume that each would rely on different technology to manage their own [...]

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

–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 acquire information management software vendor Autonomy for $10.2B. Combined, these moves confirm HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker’s [...]

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

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 million.
Immediately after the acquisition, Salesforce announced that while Dimdim would remain “fully operational during the [...]

Top Takeaways from Pervasive’s 2010 IntegratioNext Conference

Wow the déjà vu is just too strange! In June of this year, I attended Pervasive’s Metamorphosis Partner event–during which IBM announced that it would acquire Cast Iron. Now, in November, during Pervasive’s very well-attended IntegratioNext User Conference, Dell announced plans to buy Boomi.
As I wrote after the Metamorphosis event, IBM’s acquisition of Cast Iron [...]

Recent Vendor Briefing Highlights: IBM’s Cast Iron Acquisition

We are publishing recent vendor highlights on the SMB Group web site. As time permits, we discuss our key take-aways from more interesting briefings. I will try to remember to post them here as well. Here is the most recent one.
Highlights:
In May of this year, IBM acquired Cast Iron Systems (for an undisclosed sum) to help [...]

IBM’s Cast Iron Acquisition (6-17-10)

Highlights:
In May of this year, IBM acquired Cast Iron Systems (for an undisclosed sum) to help customers more effectively tackle the challenges of integrating cloud and on-premise solutions. Cast Iron, which was founded in 2001 and has 75 employees, provides hundreds of pre-built templates and a “configuration, not coding” approach to help streamline and shorten [...]

Does IBM Lotus Really Want to Get Small? My Take on Brent Leary’s Podcast

I still haven’t had time to write about Lotusphere 2010, but in the meantime, you may want to listen to the conversation I had with small business guru and friend Brent Leary. Last week, Brent interviewed me about my take on this year’s Lotus event, announcements and news.
Naturally, our conversation centered on the small business angle, which [...]

Standing Out in a Sea of Green IT: IBM’s Scalable Modular Data Centers for Midsize Companies

As a follow up to my post What Is Green IT and Why Should You Care?, I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Sams, VP for IBM’s Global Site and Facilities Services, along with several other members of IBM’s green team. As part of its Smarter Planet mission, IBM is active on all fronts [...]