If you are the CEO of a start-up software company, be very wary of best practices. If you are the CEO of an expansion stage software company, be aware of best practices and know where and how to apply them, but still beware! Instead of focusing on best practices, work hard to understand and prioritize…
Many expansion stage software companies consider themselves technology companies. That is, they are most proud of their technology and that’s how they identify themselves. I believe at least for some of them, the term “technology company” does not exactly fit the description. Instead, I think there are four broad types of software businesses at the…
The following pattern strikes me as bizarre, almost crazy, and yet I see it present at many expansion stage software companies: Spend tons of money on sales and marketing like it’s the company’s sole mission and avoid “expensive” luxuries like a User Experience / Interaction designer, a GUI artist, and perhaps even a true Product…
If you are a CEO or a manager and you want to ruin your business, do the following: Recruit just one mediocre person to your senior team and keep them there. Change your mind on a weekly basis. Abdicate running the business to metrics. I listed three things that can help you become a horrible…
Last week, Hunter Richards at Software Advice blogged about how VARs should navigate the cloud computing market and related virtualization trends. Based on his recommendations, in order for VARs to maintain their business and competitive positioning, they should do the following: Specialize Develop competency on a leading PaaS Make the cloud’s efficiency work for you and utilize cloud…
I recently attended OpenView Senior Adviser Luke Hohmann‘s Innovation Games ® class, where I was exposed to a whole new form of primary market research. Innovation Games are carefully designed exercises that use collaboration, visuals, physical props, and facilitation to elicit feedback and creative insights from participants not typically captured by other market research.The feedback and insights can help drive…
This week I heard two announcements concerning venture capital investment into expansion stage software vendors in the cloud computing space. One is Symplified, which raised $9 million from insiders and Quest. I wrote in the past about the importance and opportunity for a new breed of identity and access management vendors in the cloud context. Quest seems…
Enterprise IT executives are struggling to answer the question: Do we go with a private cloud solution or a public cloud solution to meet business demands? Or do we start with public and then switch to private once we catch up?Or do we do hybrid?And if we do hybrid, what goes where and why? Start-up…
When I speak with IT heads at various organizations about cloud computing, regardless of their size, they express a mix of excitement and dread. They express excitement because the cloud presents a great opportunity for IT to offer self-service with better utilized resources to its clients. They express dread because they’re under pressure to deliver,…
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about security being a major issue in the cloud market, and the closely related virtualization market. Juniper testified that security was a significant virtualization trend by acquiring expansion stage software company Altor Networks for $95 million cash earlier this week (full story here). Altor provides a security suite tailored to…
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