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Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 2)

Posted on Wednesday, Jul 18th

SM: So your professional career began at Oracle. KR: Yes. I left Oracle to get a business degree at Stanford University. When I graduated in 1994, I started a consulting company called Emergent that focused on designing and building Business Intelligence solutions for large companies. We were acquired by Keane (a public systems integration company)

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Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 2)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 17th

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? EG: Well for one thing, Blurb was a very contrarian play at the time. VCs were funding blogging platforms and social networks and online plays – and here we were taking bits back into atoms. But fortunately I had good relationships in the

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Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin (Part 1)

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 17th

We have had lots of discussions about Enterprise 3.0. In this interview, I will be speaking with Ken Rudin, CEO of Lucidera, a young company attempting to become a leader in the massive Business Intelligence market by applying Enterprise 3.0 principles. Readers, note that Ken is an experienced serial entrepreneur, and you will learn much

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 7)

Posted on Monday, Jul 16th

Sridhar’s thesis around Zoho is to ride on top of the market awareness already created by Salesforce.com, Webex and others around On-Demand / SaaS delivery models for business applications like the Office Suite, CRM, Web Conferencing, Project Management, etc. and simply do a dramatic undercutting based on price. He insists that the amount of Sales

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 6)

Posted on Sunday, Jul 15th

Here we begin to explore the current status of Zoho a bit further. Impressive numbers considering there has been no advertising campaigns conducted. The business model is simple – let users try the service for free, when they are comfortable they will migrate over. Afterwards, they compete based on pricing (less than 20% of the

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 5)

Posted on Saturday, Jul 14th

Interesting comparisons here by Sridhar between the Zoho CRM and the SalesForce CRM products; while SalesForce has a high focus on sales teams (and one of the best telesales teams anywhere in the world), Zoho is simply looking to take a competitive advantage in terms of pricing. According to Sridhar this shows in the construct

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Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 4)

Posted on Friday, Jul 13th

AdventNet provides a safety zone from which to launch Zoho, which is why I was looking to gain an understanding of the revenue and cash position of the company. While competition will be stiff from Google and Microsoft, as well as other CRM and group meeting companies, Zoho seems to have a unique philosophy of

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Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 4)

Posted on Friday, Jul 13th

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? PF: We’ve built an extremely talented team across the board – from developers to sales executives. A large proportion found their jobs through Indeed itself, which is gratifying. We’re continuing to build the team and our current open positions are listed

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