Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of your customers consists of IT or IT-enabled businesses?

Joe Langner: Depending on what you define as IT or IT enabled, across all of Sage mid-market customers, 16% to 19% fall into that category.

SM: What are we seeing in this segment as far as needs and behaviors? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At the level you are talking about, the competitor is no longer QuickBooks, it is Intacct and Netsuite.

Joe Langner: When you look purely at the enterprise resource planning (ERP) of Netsuite and Intacct, you can say that there can be friction. We do want to have the best ERP and the best accounting package that people can buy, but we also want to address a lot of the friction that has occurred. We are doing that through leveraging the web.  If we have a CRM or a front-end system and we also have the ERP system, we can address some of those challenges that the others have because we own both the front-end and the back-end, and we have the ability to make the systems work together more seamlessly. If you think about the social media space, you have Facebook, and the Facebook ID is used a lot with other applications. >>>

Acquia Wants To Be the Red Hat of Drupal

A Forrester study estimates the enterprise social networks market to grow to $6.4 billion in 2016 from an estimated $600 million in 2010. McKinsey also estimates that the use of enterprise social network will grow at an annual rate of 42.4% over the period 2011 to 2016.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 1)

For the past 15 months, Joe Langner has been the executive vice president of mid-market solutions for Sage North America. He comes with an extensive management background which includes strategic planning, operational excellence, and profitable growth. In this interview he discusses mobile and social applications and Sage’s current position on the market regarding those applications.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Joe, and welcome to the series. It would be helpful to give our readers some context about Sage. Then we will dive in to specific topics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Could you summarize BMC’s philosophy in terms of your product roadmap in the area of the cloud?

Mark Settle: We have a SaaS offering for one of our principal offers, our remedy service staff solution. Now customers can implement that on campus, as they have done in the past. They basically have access to two versions. One is a hosted solution we call “Remedy on demand,” and the second is a version of remedy that has been written on a Force.com platform called “Remedy Force.” As you mentioned before, there are a lot of IT people or shops who want to come out of the IT business and who don’t want to worry about the hardware or the DR capability. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There have been attempts to solve certain problems. But right now there is a larger focus on big data which is driving toward the mid-market. That is one of the trends I see. Certain corporations have tackled the big data problem for a long time by investing in big systems and custom-built solutions. From a private point of view, we are seeing more activity in building big data solutions, which are becoming more affordable for the mid-market. That mid-market could never afford [to spend] that money on warehouses and custom solutions. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 4)

MS: There is an interesting site for travel agents. You, as the buyer of the vacation, enter a description of the type of vacation you want: if you want it to be a romantic experience, an athletic experience, a trip with your wife, etc. So, you provide a broad outline of the experience you are looking for, and then agents from around the world bid on supplying your needs. Then you can pick the top three and get prices. After that you pick the one you want. Basically, instead of you doing all the work and interrogating 10 different agents, you just make a one-time statement of what you are looking for, and they bid on that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What do you consider being open problems right now? This is one of the areas in which our audience is always very interested. If an entrepreneur is looking for open problems to solve right now, where do you see opportunities?

Mark Settle: That is a good question. Most of the large enterprises are dipping their toe in the water. They are exploring cases like DBi in the cloud, where a virtual desktop is offered. Maybe they have contractors or training facilities in different parts of the globe. I believe that storage in the cloud is a real area of opportunity, and I know investments have happened there in the past. But storage continues to be a large cost factor for most organizations. I think there are lots of ways to make the cost of storage more transparent by getting a monthly bill for it, and then dividing that bill and charging departments back. This is opposed to the classical way IT usually makes business, which is to creep more and more storage over time and then charge it back on a block basis. You can make this much more transactional with the use of a cloud provider. I think this offers a lot of opportunities. >>>