Riding the consumerisation of IT trend that’s blowing the cobwebs off enterprise software, Belgian startup Showpad — which makes iPad software for sales teams — has raised a $2 million Series A funding round from early stage European VC firm, Hummingbird Ventures. Showpad said it plans to use the funding to grow its own sales and marketing team, and to “invest heavily” in platform development. → Read More
No, this isn’t a guest column by Aaron Levie. Though he and his startup Box, the poster child of the “sexy enterprise,” are definitely included in the bunch. “You should definitely kick Aaron off the list. Just to mess with him,” Zendesk founder Mikkel Svane commented when he heard what we were writing. With VCs voting with their feet and eschewing consumer startups… → Read More
Editor’s note: Mikkel Svane is CEO and co-founder of Zendesk.
It’s hard to imagine the time when you couldn’t date anyone you liked. Cultural barriers got in the way. Your access to information was limited, and your ways of communicating were few. You were restricted from true choice. Then the culture changed, and technology helped it. Today’s dating world is transformed by both changes… → Read More
Editor’s note: DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. You can follow him on Twitter.
The enterprise is back. We’re seeing a resurgence of companies to help support everyday work tasks. A central theme to this new wave of innovation is the application of core product tenets from the consumer space to the enterprise. → Read More
“On time and under budget” is manna from heaven for project managers the world over, but unfortunately for most of them, those working on the projects and those commissioning them, it’s not often the case. Now, a Y Combinator alum (Winter 2011 class) called Acunote is launching a new project management system that wants to change that — by offering a platform to help people manage their tasks… → Read More
The first image that comes to my mind when I think about business computing is the dystopic scene from the 1984 Apple commercial: A swarm of employees wearing the same uniforms and marching in unison into their offices where they are forced to use certain devices and software.
They sit down in front of their PCs, open a business application their company paid millions of dollars to implement… → Read More
The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive’s Tony Zingale came on to talk about a user survey that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive’s software and answer why Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press.
I invited Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Yammer’s David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it… → Read More
Enterprise software isn’t as sexy a topic as the iPhone or consumer apps. So why do I love to cover it? The fights.
While most consumer Internet companies view their market as a warm and fuzzy place where there can be multiple winners, in enterprise software it’s a slug fest. Companies are competing head-to-head for deals and customers want as few software vendors as possible. That means scrappy… → Read More
Ben Horowitz is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of Opsware.
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume”… → Read More
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume” enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter.
But when I talk to the most successful… → Read More
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