Tag Archives: Customer

May 2, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Salesforce Launches Communities – Tying the Back Office to the Customer View

By Ben Kepes

As the pace of business increases, and consumers of products or services demand that their provider is more responsive to their particular requirements, there is an ever growing need for customer facing solutions which are integrated with the back office solutions that organizations use to run their sales, marketing and

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April 14, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Rackspace Taps Third party Service Providers to Build Out International Presence

By Ben Kepes

Rackspace (disclosure – Rackspace supported the creation of the CloudU education program I formerly ran) is a little bit like the little engine that could. It’s continually fighting the perception (and, to be frank, the reality) that it’s the very poor cousin to the AWS steamroller. As such it needs

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April 5, 2013 Posted in Business 3 Comments

On Small Business Accounting, Yodlee, Perceptions and Critical Mass

By Ben Kepes

UK (and global, to an extent) SMB accounting vendor FreeAgent recently announced that it was rolling out automated bank feeds for its customers. For those of you who don’t follow the space, automatic bank feeds (the ability for a small business to have all it’s transactions show up within its

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January 29, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Churn and SaaS

By Ben Kepes

SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop

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January 22, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term

By Ben Kepes

I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether

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November 8, 2012 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”

By Ben Kepes

I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the traditional analyst firms. Their people are incredibly smart and very thorough, but sometimes in their search for massive levels of details, they miss the very point of technology. A good case in point is the recently released Forrester Enterprise Cloud Database Wave report.

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November 6, 2012 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Zendesk Launches Voice for New Zealand Customers

By Ben Kepes

Exciting news for New Zealand customers of Zendesk (disclosure – in the past I’ve done a small amount of consulting for them) who, from today, will be able to join Zendesk customers in other counties in utilizing Zendesk Voice. Zendesk voice (my writeup here) gained a lot of attention a

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October 16, 2012 Posted in Business 5 Comments

Cloud Portability – On Getting Data Out

By Ben Kepes

Much of the work I do revolves around talking to organizations about how they’ll start their journey to the cloud – discussions around barriers to adoption, dealing with cultural issues and security concerns all typically the main topics of interest. Recently, however, I was pointed in the direction of a

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September 30, 2012 Posted in Business 4 Comments

Xero Rolls Out Some More Network Effects and Faces Some Criticism. Some Lessons on Viral Strategies

By Ben Kepes

Xero (disclosure – I’ve done a tiny bit of consulting for Xero and am co-founder of LiveMigrate, a service that migrates businesses from desktop accounting applications to Xero) rolled out a new update this week which included some interesting and valuable features. The introduction of online invoicing is a bit of

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September 13, 2012 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Customer Metrics for SaaS Companies

By Ben Kepes

One of the key pieces of advice for SaaS startups (actually all startups really but in this case of particular relevance to SaaS0 is to measure everything. Over the last few years a number of different solutions have been developed which allow companies to measure different parts of their business

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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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