Monthly Archives: March 2012

March 30, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Clarifying the Acronyms – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

By Ben Kepes

CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea,

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March 29, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

SnapLogic Adds Monitoring to Integration

By Ben Kepes

Application integration in a cloudy world is an important and often forgotten area that I am predicting will see significant movement in the months ahead. One of the long standing providers in the field who still remains independent (after Dell’s purchase of Boomi and IBM’s purchase of CastIron) is SnapLogic

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March 28, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Google Apps Introduces Vault–Enterprise Will Love This

By Ben Kepes

One of the barriers that people put up against using Google Apps within enterprise is the apparent lack of robust functionality that the largest enterprises require. A big part of this lacking functionality lies in the e-discovery of documents, the ability to apply governance to information assets and to archive

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March 28, 2012 Posted in Business 4 Comments

Is Multi-Currency Actually Important for SMBs?

By Ben Kepes

Of late there has been a bunch of discussion about whether or not multi-currency functionality is important for SMBs. Some commentators came to this conversation from the perspective that if SaaS accounting vendors want to achieve scale, they have to provide for multi-currency. n a post discussing this AccMan says

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March 27, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Cloud’s Secret Sauce–Zendesk Delivers Best Practice Analytics and Customer Satisfaction Data

By Ben Kepes

I’ve long said that one of the key benefits of cloud applications is the ability of vendors to aggregate and anonymize data from their users, and to offer this anonymized aggregated data back to users who can then derive insights from comparisons between themselves and other vendors. It’s an area

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March 26, 2012 Posted in Business 6 Comments

On Trial Periods for SaaS Companies–Is Shorter Better?

By Ben Kepes

Recently KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson made the decision to reduce the trial periods offered on his product from 60 days down to 14. In blogging about this change, Jackson explained the decision saying; We analysed our trial data and found that the vast majority of people who never converted from

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March 23, 2012 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Zendesk + edocr Makes Support Easier and More Repeatable

By Ben Kepes

Part of running an effective customer support operation is giving people access to documentation that helps them provide the quickest possible resolution to customer issues. In a rapidly changing world this is actually much more difficult as it sounds as approaches, procedures and specifications change rapidly. A new integration between

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March 22, 2012 Posted in Business 2 Comments

Reflecting on RLM – Transverse Billing and Subscription Vendor

By Ben Kepes

When in Austin recently I took the opportunity to meet with Transverse, another player in a space I call Revenue Lifecycle Management of RLM. Revenue Lifecycle Management includes the obvious functional area such as subscription and billing services, but extends these into a realm that deals with the entire lifecycle

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March 21, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

NZ Cloud Code of Practice

By Ben Kepes

A year or so ago some folks down here in New Zealand started talking about the need for a Cloud Code of Practice to protect consumers and give some marketplace consistency in the rapidly growing Cloud space. I fully support initiatives such as this that find a nice balance between

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March 21, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Nimsoft Monitors vCloud

By Ben Kepes

Nimsoft (more on them here) is today announcing its monitoring toolset, Nimsoft Monitor, covers the performance monitoring of vCloud environments. I’ve long said that dynamic monitoring and control will become increasingly important in the future as organizations look to really leverage the elasticity that cloud brings – one can only

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The Author

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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