EnjoyTech

Having worked on enterprise software product and go-to-market strategy for SMB (small and medium businesses), I can tell you that these are the most difficult customers to reach to, especially the S in SMB. It’s an asymmetric non-homogeneous market for which the cost of sales could go out of control if you don’t leverage the right channels. The competitive landscape varies from region to region and industry to industry. In many cases instead of competing against a company you would be competing against a human being with paper-based processes. Tomorrow I am speaking at the Razorsight annual conference on the topic of cloud computing. I am excited to meet their customers, the telcos. While I prepare for my keynote, I can’t stop thinking about the challenges that the telcos face and the opportunities that they are not pursuing. My keynote presentation is about how telcos can leverage the cloud, but this blog post is about how telcos can become successful enterprise software vendors and ...

On Quora Steve Blank asked "Is it possible to use Lean Startup customer development findings to inform IxD personas?" This post is my response to Steve on Quora : Absolutely yes. Pivoting is not just about finding the right business model that works for a start-up but it is also about nailing down the persona that you are designing your product for. I have seen many start-up fail because they don't know who the end user is. Creating a persona is an iterative process by itself. Many people focus on persona as a final artifact but I believe that the journey is more important than the destination. While discovering a persona and iterate on it to make it crisp, the team - the dev, marketing, and UX - comes together with the shared understanding of the target end user. The journey brings in the empathy that they all internalize and that influences what they do. The journey includes getting out of the office and talk to the real people who you think would use your product. P...

In my previous post “ While Entrepreneurs Scale On The Cloud The Angels Get Supersized ” I wrote about how cloud computing is disrupting the VC industry. Continuing on the thread of entrepreneurship I am seeing more and more entrepreneurs building applications who do not belong to any formal organization, start-up or otherwise. The definition of what used to be a start-up itself is changing, primarily because of two reasons - simple and easily accessible PaaS tools to design, run, and maintain applications on the cloud and access to a market place to sell the applications. We have been witnessing this trend for the mobile applications for a while - Android as well as iPhone and now iPad. I see the same pattern for the cloud-based applications. I have seen many useful, productive, and successful applications that are designed by individual developers with no affiliation to any organization. Google has done a great job in designing the tools for the developers to build applications that ...

Cloud computing is disrupting the venture capital industry in a big way. One of the obvious changes we all have observed is the reduced up-front capital expenditure to start a new venture. Things that used to require an array of expensive servers and an army of people to maintain them have essentially been replaced by a bunch of EC2 instances and a few smart developers. The tools and the technology stack for today’s applications are designed for cheaper and faster experimentation allowing the entrepreneurs to follow the lean methodology and pivot as fast as they can. I agree that some investors underestimate the people cost and overestimate the capabilities of the cloud but regardless this has caused a major shift in how the companies are funded. The rise of an emergent category of super angel is all about leveraging the cloud computing. Fred Wilson closed a $30 million fund and Aydin Senkut closed a $40 million fund. These funds will invest into dozens of companies that can be boo...

Today Intel announced that it is buying McAfee for $7.7 billion. This acquisition made people scratch their heads. Why McAfee? The obvious arguments are that Intel has hit the growth wall and organic growth is not good enough to satisfy the shareholders. But this argument quickly falls apart from margin perspective. Why dilute their current nice gross margin even if McAfee has steady revenue stream? [Read my update at the end of the post] I believe there are two reasons. The first is that the companies need a balanced product and revenue mix regardless of different margins. Oracle bought Sun and HP bought EDS. Big companies do this all the time. The second, not so obvious, reason is a recognition that software is new hardware. The processors are processors – they are a commodity any which way you look at them. It is not news to anyone that the computing has become commodity which is the basis of utility style cloud computing. Software, embedded or otherwise, has significant potential ...

In my previous post “ Social CRM Is Only The First Half Of A Social Enterprise ” I started the discussion on why social CRM is only the first half of a social enterprise and how we can go to the core and build a true social enterprise. Continuing the discussion on the missing half on a social enterprise this is the part 2. Transform productivity silos into collaborative content curation: The social software gets better as more people use it but we need more people to make it useful. There is no easy way out. As Andrew McAfee’s rightly put it Email is a 9x problem . There isn’t significant juice in standalone social software to gain broader adoption due to the endowment effect . There is a huge adoption barrier for standalone social software to be successful since it is not contextualized into a business process. The users simply see it as yet another tool that increases their cognitive overload. I suggest don’t go after social software that is designed to create a parallel universe. In...

I was a guest on Novell's radio/podcast series, the Cloud Chasers . The topic was " The Next Cloud: Emerging Business Models And Their Impact On The Enterprise ". It was a great conversation! You can download the podcast here or tune in below: