In the software industry you often hear about sales and marketing being compared to machines or factories. Executives like this analogy because it suggests that sales and marketing is able to consistently produce outputs in a predictable, repeatable way – like a machine or factory would. Executives and investors want to remove the uncertainty that often accompanies sales and marketing.
Everyone is talking about cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) these days. Almost every technology vendor has announced a cloud strategy – even the traditional software zealots. But what do cloud computing and SaaS mean for product managers? The impacts are more significant than you may think. From pricing and profitability measurement to sales and marketing, cloud is having a noteworthy influence on the…
Over the past 18 months there have been an increasing number of high-profile outages amongst providers of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors. Application vendors Intuit and Workday both suffered extensive service disruptions, which impacted a broad segment of their user community. Infrastructure providers have suffered short outages over the past year as well. Even heavy weights amazon.com and Google…
