(Originally published in Small Business Computing, November 30, 2009) Technology insiders tend to throw around technical terms and business jargon, assuming people outside the industry understand what it all means. By its nature, technology vocabulary is often confusing and complicated, and insiders often add ...
Tag: Marketing
Top Takeaways from IBM’s General Business Influencer Summit
Last week, I attended IBM’s General Business (GB) Influencer Summit for analysts covering the mid-market (companies with 100 to 1000 employees and larger enterprises that are not currently spending a lot with IBM, sometimes termed “white space” accounts). I’ve attended this event since IBM began holding them a few years back. IBM recently split GB into two groups, creating separate sales and ...
Small Business Has a Big Appetite for Digital and Social Media Marketing
Small business adoption of technology-based solutions rarely keeps pace with the expectations of vendors, analysts and pundits. When it comes adoption of digital marketing and social media tools, however, small business adoption is fast and furious. Recently, we (Hurwitz & Associates) conducted a survey sponsored by email marketing vendor
Another Plea for Plain English!
Yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s Here and Now at lunch time while running a few errands in my car. I tuned into a great story about the “Plain English Campaign”, which was founded in 1979 by now 71-year old Chrissie Maher. The organization’s mi...
PDFSalesLeads-A Clever Solution to the Pesky .PDF Problem
In our industry, vendors spend a lot of time and money developing white papers to educate prospects about new technologies. White papers that are well-researched and clearly written can help explain the value of new or complex solutions to the audiences that can potentially benefit from them. Of course, vendors also want to generate qualified sales leads from their white papers. But when it c...
Prescription for Subscription Fatigue? Time for New SaaS Pricing Models
As an analyst that’s covered the software-as-service (SaaS) market since 1999, I am briefed by vendors introducing new subscription services into the market on a regular basis. Many of these solutions provide small businesses with real solutions to real problems—whether helping you market your business, keep your books, manage projects or pay your bills (just to mention few). In many ways, SaaS...
IBM Lotus Foundations: A Real Choice for Small Businesses and Partners
As I mentioned in a blog I posted after Lotusphere 2009, IBM Lotus has been reluctant to go head to head with obvious rivals, particularly Microsoft. At Lotusphere, however, the company came out swinging, declaring intentions “shatter Windows” and “change desktop economics” with Symphony, the free Lotus desktop suite, and compete aggressively against Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) with t...
Impressions from Sage Insights 2009
Last week, I attended Insights, Sage North America’s annual partner event. I’ve attended this event for several years now, watching the company’s attempts to create a cohesive brand and strategy across its many small and medium business (SMB) solutions. At last year’s Insights, Sage had just hired Sue Swenson
Managed Services: Dell’s Next Disruption?
What do you get when you combine an industrial-strength managed services platform, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) desktop management solution, and a hardware vendor that transformed the PC and server industries with its direct, Internet sales model? The answer is Dell’s ProManage Managed Services, which is built on Dell’s ...
Demandbase—Can it Turn Your Web Traffic Into Treasure?
Like most analysts, my schedule is usually chockfull of briefings from vendors. Some of these are boring, some are interesting, and once in a blue moon, a vendor comes along with a solution that everyone should know about. Demandbase (www.demandbase.com) is one of these solutions. I initially came across the vendor late last fall, when I was judging for the Destination CR...