After marking my calendar to attend Pervasive’s 2013 Integration World, I had to wonder whether or not Actian’s pending acquisition of Pervasive would be a done deal–or not–by April 14, when the conference was due to kick off. After all, I figured that if things were still up in the air, I’d probably leave with more questions than answers. Although it seemed pretty clear to me that the combine...
Tag: Cloud Computing
Key Themes from SAP TechEd 2011–How Do They Relate to SMBs?
As the name implies, SAP TechEd offers technical education, such as hands-on workshops, deep-dive lectures and sessions with SAP technical experts about all things SAP. That said, TechEd isn't for everyone, and it’s no wonder that most of the 6,500+ attendees at SAP TechEd 2011, held the week of September 12 in Las Vegas, were SAP partners and technology specialists from the vendor’s large ente...
Is Salesforce.com Outgrowing SMBs?
Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...
Reflections on Dreamforce 2011: Now the Cloud Can Ride the Waves
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 social solutions. Traveling in the Way Back Machine ...
Sage Summit 2011: Tackling the Sage NA Branding Challenge
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 brand across multiple small and medium business (SMB) solutions. Earlier this year, following Sue Swenson’s retirement, Pascal Houillon to...
The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event
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, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged at last week’s Dell’...
Dell and Boomi: Doubling Down on Integration
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, der...
Intuit and Salesforce Partner Up: Who’s the Big Winner?
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 resell a pre-integrated version of the Salesforce CRM application via Intuit’s App Center (as well as Intui...
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 afte...
HubSpot: From Breakthrough to Breakout
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 evidenced by HubSpot’s announceme...