office 2.0 – Gadi Shamia

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)” →

I was invited by my friend Ismael Ghalimi to host a panel during Office 2.0 about my favorite topic, SaaS. The session is about going 100% SaaS and what it means. My panelists are Dan Druker from Intacct, Doug Harr from Ingres, Rob Hull from Adaptive Planning and Rene Lacerte from Bill.com. What’s great about this team is that they are all senior executives that pioneered SaaS either with their current company or in previous lives: Dan was part of Postini (later sold to Google), Rene co-founded PayCycle, one of the best kept SaaS success secrets in the valley, Rob co-founded Adaptive Planning in 2003, when no one believed SaaS will ever happen and Doug spent 5 years with Portal Software, that was acquired by Oracle. We would not be lacking perspective here…

In the next couple of weeks I will share my thoughts about the 100% SaaS goal as I progress in preparing for it. For now I wanted to go back to the title, and explain the interesting story behind Office 2.0 and its connection to the Burning Man festival. Continue reading “Office 2.0 and Burning Man?” →