Enterprise Freemium: IT and the startup

I’d like to throw out an idea for discussion, especially as it applies to startups selling into the enterprise:
Small buyers of technology, acting early in the technology adoption life-cycle, are motivated by hope (hope == ROI, opportunity, etc). Large buyers of technology, acting late in the life-cycle, are motivated by fear (fear == risk of […]

“Tiger Team Innovation in the Enterprise”

I gave a talk today at the pre-conference CxO breakfast for the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. The group was great; so much discussion that we didn’t make it through all of the material I had planned.
As promised, here are the slides from today’s presentation. We talked so much about each point that I’m […]

New Enterprise Security Threats: Emerging Technologies

Each generational transition in IT, such as from mainframe to client server or from client server to web applications, has presented challenges to enterprise security. The pattern is clear, and will likely sound familiar to anyone working in IT through these last two major shifts:

The emerging technology is initially ignored as a lab project or […]

Upcoming Podium Pontification

I’m going to be speaking at a couple of related events in March. The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on the 28th and 29th in Philadelphia has an interesting array of topics, centered around open source, lightweight architectures and Web 2.0, all with an enterprise twist. On the first day, I’m giving a talk […]

New Enterprise Security Threats: SaaS

It has always been hard for the enterprise to address emerging information security issues proactively; usually these things end up dealt with by the majority of companies once a loss has hit close to home or regulatory attention has been brought to bear. I was lucky to be able to work with some very smart […]

Rumpelstiltskin’s reporting interface

If Rumpelstiltskin sold a product to enterprise customers, he would quickly learn a lesson that we learned at my last company: no matter how fantastically his product could spin straw into gold, his sales would also depend on his product’s ability to display and report on every aspect of the spinning process. It doesn’t […]