Brent Sordyl's blog

January 18, 2013 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

“Rogue clouds” occur if sales and marketing people, for example, order up Salesforce.com without bothering to consult IT or set up Dropbox with outside vendors to share sensitive information. It’s happening to three-quarters of those using cloud, according to the survey, and it occurs more in large enterprises (83%) than in small to midsize ones (70%).

(Full Story: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/011613-rogue-clouds-265854.html )

coud computing, rogue clouds, saas, shadow it

Don’t Blindly Model Your SaaS Pricing on 37signals

November 29, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

For the purposes of this discussion, it may be helpful to define some rough price points for web apps that fit into the three viable boxes. Keep in mind that these are totally arbitrary — they are useful only because they are common and easy to build cash flow models around (or discover where cash flow is going to be a problem).

Self-service: $10-$200 / month
Low-End Transactional: $200-$3,000 / month
High-End Transactional (“Enterprise”): $3,000-$6,000 / month
Enterprise: $6,000-$40,000+ / month

(Full Story: Don’t Blindly Model Your SaaS Pricing on 37signals)

pricing, saas

Pabst CIO Ben Haines brewing cloud first IT | ZDNet

August 28, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

But first Haines had to clean out its legacy infrastructure in a process that’s still ongoing. More often than not, being nimble requires a cloud first approach—an unlikely strategy given the size of its acquisition-happy rivals. “What I’ve been doing is ripping out legacy and replacing them with software as a service,” said Haines.

His first move was ditching Microsoft Outlook and Exchange for Google Apps. Okta, which manages identity as a service, Zendesk (helpdesk), Concur (expense management, Box (doc sharing) and Tidemark (analytics) were ushered in to put IT in front of business. BlackBerries were tossed—along with the servers that went with them—for Apple iPhones and cloud mobile device management tools. Haines’ method is to replace commodity infrastructure with cloud services.

(Full Story: Pabst CIO Ben Haines brewing cloud first IT | ZDNet)

cloudcomputing, saas

Pinboard owner on The Business of Bookmarking

February 27, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The combination of low startup costs and investor aversion means there are all kinds of opportunities lying around for a developer to run a profitable small business, provided he or she remembers to charge money

(Full Story: Pinboard owner on The Business of Bookmarking)

pinboard, saas, startup