Workday Raises $75 Million- Good Sign for the Business Software World

Workday, a financial and human resources SaaS provider, has secured $75 million in Series E funding. In my humble opinion, this is a very good sign that investments in business software are going to get a boost in the next few years.

Look back 15 years ago and compare the progress in “consumer computing” to the progress in “business computing” – the differences are amazing.  Consumers moved from 14K modems to cable, from one inbox per office to unlimited mail accounts and storage, from backing up files on floppy disks to box.net, from from Rolodex to manage their personal lives to Facebook, from expensive and complex Photoshop to Picasa, from mail orders to Amazon and from paper atlas to Google maps. Our lives as consumers are almost 100% digitized now. Continue reading “Workday Raises $75 Million- Good Sign for the Business Software World”

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Workday Raises $75 Million- Good Sign for the Business Software World

IT can be a boring job (for some)

Office 2.0 is just around the corner and I am preparing for my session (going 100% SaaS) by interacting with my panelists and doing some thinking. My current thread is thinking about IT and its traditional role vs. its new role in the SaaS era.  There were ups and downs in the way IT viewed SaaS and now it seems that IT professionals divide into two camps: the ones that strongly embrace SaaS, and the ones that wait for it to go away.

In general, the ones that want it to go away like control, like hands on approach and rather do the tactical work as a way to keep their kingdom intact. If you work for a startup you may not believe me but in a big company your worth goes up with the number of people you manage and you don’t want to lose anyone you gained. Continue reading “IT can be a boring job (for some)”

IT can be a boring job (for some)

The SMB Market- Difficult To Win, But Too Large Not To Try

Quick quiz to start things off: Who is the market leader in the enterprise software space? If you guessed Oracle, IBM and SAP, you got 5 points and a bonus. Question 2: who rules the consumer space? 5 points if you guessed Google and an extra 1 if you added Microsoft. Question number 3: who is the market leader in SMB? If “let me think” is your answer, you are in good company (and you got 2 points for having a brain…). So how come such a large market doesn’t have a market leader? Continue reading “The SMB Market- Difficult To Win, But Too Large Not To Try”

The SMB Market- Difficult To Win, But Too Large Not To Try