Salesforce.com Playing VC

I wrote a piece earlier called Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy Again? In that, I made the point that given where the Internet is today, bootstrapping companies has suddenly become very easy, and gobs of venture capital are no longer required to build the vast majority of businesses. Now, many of the larger companies are actually

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Salesforce.com Steps into the Main Arena

Today, Salesforce.com (Nasdaq: CRM) announced the acquisition of an OnDemand Content Management SaaS company, Koral, which is a Web 2.0 spin on a mainstream enterprise software application: Content Management. I listened to Marc Benioff’s presentation at the Four Seasons this afternoon. Marc and the CEO of Koral demonstrated some funky functionality, touting Unstructured Data Management

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Microsoft’s Growth Strategy Revisited

On April 10, 2005, almost immediately after I started this blog, I had written a piece called Microsoft’s Two Should-Be Acquisition Candidates, from the point of view of addressing the growth trends in the SME markets. The two candidates were: Autodesk (ADSK) and PayChex (PAYX). I have to pay close attention to Microsoft, since my

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Saas: CRM & the Extended Enterprise

In the recently concluded Philippe Courtot interview, we discussed at length the Extended Enterprise and its challenges from the perspective of Collaboration and Security. I wrote a follow-on piece on how Webex has done an excellent job capitalizing on the Extended Enterprise opportunity. (You can read the Courtot interview here: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part

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Yahoo Needs To Open APIs

Next generation online advertising : some recommendations.