Ben Kepes

Projecting Xero's annual report

July 26, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Once again AccMan sponsor Xero put in a solid performance for 2009-2010, closing out the year with revenue of NZ$3.4 million from a final customer count of 17,000. That was up from NZ$1.1 on 6,000 customers in 2009. This was achieved for a final headcount of 90 compared with 56 the previous year. Xero states [...]

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What if your reseller went away?

February 4, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Reseller issues are an emerging topic for SaaS vendors. That means it should also be a topic for buyers. For years, buyers haven’t needed to give a second thought as to whether their software reseller will be around. Despite some consolidation, it has been a case of business as usual. SaaS disrupts that market in [...]

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Multi-currency war report

January 22, 2010 Cloud Computing/SaaS

Re-purposing Kilgore’s famous soliloquy to Willard from Apocolypse Now, I love the smell of a vendor slugfest on an otherwise quiet Friday afternoon. And so it is. Earlier in the week on FinancialForce.com, Dave Turner seems to have set off a veritable firestorm from some of the SaaS players. Knowing Dave as well as I [...]

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Words matter

December 13, 2009 General

For most people, the nuances of technology are at best a foreign language and at worst a turn off. Buyers don’t give a flying souflee what vendors are doing as long as they know their apps are running. So when Xero put this headline into the blogs:  55,000 servers and pumping I couldn’t help but [...]

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What can we learn from Obama?

June 24, 2009 Innovation

I don’t mean here and now because at the moment he’s fouling things up. I mean when he undertook his campaign? Ben Kepes is at the Enterprise 2.0 jamboree. His piece that talks about my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut is one of the best matchings I’ve seen that illustrates the relationship between [...]

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Saas marketing wars

March 3, 2009 General

Earlier today I saw a post on Cloud Ave where Ben Kepes had ran with some clear baiting material. The old shoot first, ask questions later method of reporting. Ben had used the material he had as an intro to a sort of review about Ubikwiti. It wasn’t really a review but a litany of [...]

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SageLive, part 2: architecture, product and mobile

December 17, 2008 Featured

In the first part, I talked about Sage’s go to market and highlighted some of the business factors the market will need to consider. In this part I look at what’s on offer through the lens of an interactive demonstration of a live beta. Sage is in open beta as of tomorrow morning so please [...]

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