Here’s an edited transcript of my interview with Mike McClurg, VP of Global Midmarket Sales for IBM. [If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast, click on the orange circle below]. [soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/60487573" iframe="true" /] Laurie: Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. Before we dive into our conversation a...
Tag: IBM
The Technology—Performance Connection for Midmarket Businesses
In today’s always-on, hyper-connected world, technology has become a critical lynchpin for business success. Increasingly, businesses of all sizes view technology as an essential to improving customer engagement, raising employee productivity, and creating innovation and differentiation—all vital ingredients for building economic value. You don’t need to take my word for it. For the first ti...
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. [soundcloud url="https://a...
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 secon...
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 strategy to get ...
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...
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 w...
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, I
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 ...
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...